


After The War Had Come And Gone

by Moniquill



Category: Original Work
Genre: Animal Abuse, Cannibalism, Dehumanization, Dissociation, Dog Fighting, Famine - Freeform, Found Family, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, M/M, Mindbreak, Non-Sexual Slavery, Post-Apocalypse, Post-War, Recovery, Self-Harm, Slavery, Social revolution, Starvation, War, through the power of justly applied violence, we start in dystopia but will end up in an anarcho-socialist mega-commune
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-03
Updated: 2020-12-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:01:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 27,605
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27864257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Moniquill/pseuds/Moniquill
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a peaceful kingdom that was viciously attacked by invaders from the north. The people from the north created horrible monsters, mindless and deathless warbeasts, and they wrought ruin across the land.The last living son of the High King went on a harrowing quest to capture and tame a mountain dragon. He flew to the invaders' greatest stronghold and rained dragonfire down upon the terrible forges where the monsters were being created.In many stories, this is where there'd be a happily ever after. This is not that story.This is the story of what happens to the people left over when the Hero's attempt to save the kingdom causes the apocalypse.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 4





	1. Lacero

The first thing I knew was pain. 

I screamed the whole time I was being pulled from the vat, looked over to see if I was fit for keeping. Everyone did, when we were fresh and didn’t know better than to snivel. It didn't take me long to learn what I was and what I was for, not with so many others around to beat the facts into me. 

I was an homunculus. I reported to  Praefectus Laurentius first, and to any man who barked orders at me second, because every man was above the likes of me. 

_ I did what I was told. _

At first, while I was still getting my legs under me, I was just another pair of hands to be put to use. I carried the shit bucket to the cesspit, and jointed carcasses, and pulled other homunculi out of the vats. Some were like me, good enough for keeping. Some had to go back in the vat and stew a while longer. Some weren't fit at all, and had to be torn all to pieces. Me and my fellows got to eat those, picking the bones clean with our teeth and throwing them back into the bone pile for the rex’s magi to have another crack at. Only the best of us were worth keeping - no use wasting time on weaklings and cripples. The ones who passed the cull were the most excellent of Estiennos Rex’s creations - half again as big and strong as men, and twice as ready to tear out the throats of anyone who stood against our rex. We were made of death, of blood and magic - so much  _ more _ than hollow men in every way. The finest weapons anyone had ever crafted. 

I got to watch how the crafting went, sometimes. Got told that it was Estiennos hisself that worked out how to do it, and he taught others. Enstiennos was the only one that could make the lodestones that held souls inside - souls he’d pulled out of men and cobali who weren’t fit for fighting or much else, one of the venefici said. A Venificus would throw good meat of all kinds into a vat - pieces of men and cobali and pigs and dogs and all - and rend it down with chemiae to something that looked like clotted blood. They’d add bones and chuck in a lodestone and do more chemiae and incantations and that, then wait for the vat to ripen. Sometimes it’d just rot and they’d have to start again, and sometimes it’d turn out a weakling or a cripple and they’d have to start again, but seven or eight times in ten there’d come screaming a hale and hearty new homunculus.

Thinking on it later, it was probably half a year that I did fetch-and-carry shit in the vat rooms beneath the fastness at the gods’ forge - not that I had any idea what time meant back then. All I knew was that I eventually got judged bright enough to be worth training, so I was moved out of the vat rooms and into the barracks.

There was nothing to divide me from my fellows, in the barracks. We ate and slept and fucked and brawled in full view of each other, and of the watchers - men and cobali that watched over the lot of us, day and night, seeing what we did. If a fellow did something they liked, he might be given a bit of choice meat or a useful piece of kit. If a fellow did something they didn’t like, well, that’s what the cudgels were for. 

We weren't any kind of gentle or careful of each other - we lived or died by strength and guile. I learned quick enough that it was all a tricky balance of how well a fellow got on with everyone else, where he fell in the pissing order, and how well he could thrash anyone who looked at him sideways. We weren’t supposed to kill each other, but it happened sometimes, of an accident. 

The corpses never went to waste.

I quickly demanded the highest rank among my fellows, bringing them to heel by rallying those I could to loyalty and beating the piss out of anyone who challenged us. That was why, when it came time for picking and choosing,  Primus Philoxenos chose me. 

The Primus named me Lacero - I was a good enough weapon to be worth naming. Didn’t all of us  homunculi have names; just the ones that some man or other thought were worth naming. He put me at the head of a pack of nineteen other  homunculi and took us across the cold waters of the channel to rip out the throats of vilus men for the glory of  Estiennos Rex.

Every dead enemy was meat and bone that could be put to work in the crafting vats and  homunculi \- with help from living men and hollow ones - took one steading after another. I lived with a helmet on my head and a blade in my hand and blood on my teeth. I learned what the flesh of men tasted like. I was there for the taking of three different castelli. As far as me and mine were concerned, the taking of castelli was mostly about waiting in camps and dealing with skirmish parties as they came. It was just a question of waiting until enough of the defenders had died of it that it was worthwhile to make a run-up with ladders. 

Thing was, men stayed dead when they died. They could be raised up into hollow men, but they were still  _ dead _ \- they’d rot away to bits after a while, and they were worth fuck all in the winter because they’d freeze solid. We homunculi… we didn’t stay dead when we died. We could recover from practically anything. Only thing that could properly kill a homunculus was digging the lodestone out and smashing it to pieces. The lodestone being safe in the middle of our thick skulls under their thick helmets meant that hardly ever happened. 

So we’d kill them but fives and tens, fall back to the campus to let anyone who was torn up mend, then head out to do it again. When enough of them were dead, we’d get on the battlements, start ripping out the throats of any man bearing arms, and take the castellum. 

The sorting out of any of the vilius men and cobali that were left alive wasn’t ever something me and mine had to worry about. 

It was coming on winter when everything got fucked over.


	2. Nemmash

I was fifteen years old when the world came to an end.

“Oi, Scrap, get over here,” the matron shouted over the general din of the common mess. “Got someone looking to take on a ‘prentice and you’re likely enough.”

I finished my porridge in three bites and dropped the wooden bowl and spoon into a basin as I jostled my way over to her. A smaller brat snatched it up as soon as it was out of my hand and started licking it. Someone had probably stolen his.

Bremmenskeep prided itself on being wholly devoid of urchins. Children without patronage found themselves quickly delivered to Duke Bremmen’s Charity House - better known as the charryhouse - where they were given adequate food and shelter in exchange for nothing less than honest labor. Little hands worked at any of the city's guilds from well before dawn until well after dusk, often without pause. At the close of the day they were returned to the charryhouse to receive their bowls of gruel and pottage and to have a handful of delousing powder ground into their close-shorn hair. Despite cropped hair and delousing powder that left skin raw and eyes red and noses bloodied with every sneeze, there were always lice.

It was commonly understood that the charryhouse was a jewel in the city's crown; everyone always said so. The urchins were free to come and go as they pleased – so long as they remained innocent of loiter, begging, or thievery. So the children sent to the guild houses each day for upwards of sixteen hours and given a pallet of straw and a bowl of porridge for their effort certainly couldn't be numbered as slaves. Slavery of people was forbade by High King Dennet - only goblins could be enslaved.

I’d been left on the charryhouse doorstep as a weanling, a common enough story. I spent my days stirring vats of lye for the soapmakers' guild or gutting fish for the fishmongers' guild or running seams for the tailors' guild. Particularly lucky children might be taken on by a freehold farmer as a helpful pair of hands. Any lads who got to be sixteen were turned out to enlist in the King’s Army, and any girls turned out to find themselves either steady work or a husband. The Duke’s charity didn’t extend to grown men and women, and those found guilty of begging or loiter would be arrested by the guard and taken to the crossroads to test their luck somewhere else in the world.

The matron put me in front of a man I didn’t know, who looked me up and down.

“Scrap of a thing, he is, see why you call him that,” the man said, spitting on the floor.

“You said you want one to look after dogs, yeah?” he matron said. “Scrap’s canny enough with animals. Seen stray cats come sit right in his lap and all when he’s hanging about.”

“Eh, good enough,” the man said. “Three sovereigns, you said?”

“I did,” The matron said. “If you decide inside a week that he’s not suited to the tasks you put him to, you can bring him back - but you’ll only get one sovereign of that prentice fee back. Prentice fees go to the good of the realm and the feeding of all the littlest ones as can’t work for their keep.”

“What work is it?” I asked. They both looked at me sharply, but it was my right to refuse a prenticeship if I wanted. I couldn’t be forced into it.

“My kennel keeper died, and none of the other goblins have the salt to take his place,” The man replied. “I’m Serrik, and I run the fighting pit at the Crown and Bone. Prentice under me and you’ll get two square meals a day and a room of your own down by the kennels.”

I took a moment to consider it, then shrugged. I wasn’t likely to get a better offer, and joining the King’s Army meant I’d like as not be marched north to be thrown against the Terranish. Word on the street was that the war going poorly, that the Terranish had taken three castles in the north and pillaged the lands all around. That they had witches and monsters and all manner of foulness to their command. 

“Yeah, alright,” I said. “My proper name’s Nemmash, not Scrap.”

I offered my hand, and he shook it.

That’s why I was at the pit and not anywhere else when the ground started rumbling. 

Like everyone else, I ran out into the street to find out what was going on. Half an hour later, we got hit by the gale. Some folks were killed, then, crushed under things that’d been blown over and drowning down by the docks after being blown into the water. That included the owner of one of the best pit dogs, which Serrik promptly claimed as his own.

Next day, the sky went black. Stayed black for three days, then started thinning out to gray. A crier came from Tallatsdown talking about how Prince Marran had lately been questing and how he’d tamed a dragon and how he’d flown to the Isle of Waters to rain fire down on the greatest of the Terranish strongholds and end the war for good. 

Something’d gone wrong, though. Nobody knew what, exactly, but something’d gone  _ badly _ wrong. The rumble and the gale and the black sky were all part of it. Priests said it was the wrath of the gods and that we should all repent and pray and tithe to the temples. 

The sky never cleared from gray. Ash fell from it, now and again, spoiling water when it did - fish in the river turned belly-up. Roofs caved in under the weight of it. Spring didn’t come that year. The harvest failed.

The sky stayed gray and cold for  _ three years _ before finally clearing up. Duke Bremmen doled out rations from the castle’s granaries, and there was all manner of grifting and bribing about who got what. By the third year of winter wasn’t anyone above eating dogs and cats and rats. Folks trolled the river for whatever they could get, and. Forresters brought in acorns and pine bark and pignuts and roots along with their hauls of wood, and sometimes game that’d starved to death and froze before it rotted. Bands of armed men travelled the south road toward Tallatsdown and came back with goods and no one asked too many questions about their provenance. 

I was one of the lucky ones. Serrik was a brutal cuss with fingers in every pie in the city, and he managed to keep bread and meat on his tables. Ash-tainted bread and dog meat, but still more than other folks had. Some of the goblin slaves knew how to grow mushrooms in the dark on sawdust and dog shit. They made men that ate them sick, often as not - cooking them helped that, a bit. It kept the slaves from starving, anyway. People like to come watch the fights, which more and more got to be fights to the death because it meant losing dogs could go in the stew pot. Serrik got to be known as a man it wasn’t good to cross, in the famine years. King of the Dogsprawl. 

It was during the famine years that I learned that I had a magical knack; that I could reach inside me and pull at  _ something _ and will a body to heal. I could knit wounds shut and pull out rot and all that. In other times it’d have meant I could petition to the guild of healers for membership, could have prenticed under someone else who knew how to train up a knack properly. Wasn’t a guild of healers anymore, though. Everyone of any importance had died, because healers put themselves in the thick of things more often than most.

Doing as Serrik told me kept me as fed as anyone was in the famine years.

I heard about the coup third and fourth hand, same as I ever heard anything. Duke Bremmen and all his family murdered in their beads by Baron Hadden and his men. Criers had come from the south to tell that there wasn’t a High King in Brotherhead anymore; that there was hardly even a  _ city _ of Brotherhead anymore. The plague had come down hard, there. No help would be coming from the King’s Army. We were on our own. Hadden had a lot of the other Barons rallied to his cause, when they killed practically everyone in House Bremmen. He declared himself our new king, declared that our city wasn’t going to be part of the Old Kingdom anymore - that it would be called Haddenskeep from now on, and that it’d be a free kingdom, and that we’d only care for our own. Any guild masters who disagreed were put to death. Hadden made nice with the kings of each of the boroughs - Serrik in the Dogsprawl, Corrow in Market Square, Blind Akkas in Riverside, Eddras in the Southwash.

The charryhouse closed its doors after typhoid spread through like fire. Most of the littlest orphan brats died, and older ones were left to fend for themselves - either signed on with guilds or took to begging and thieving. King Hadden put all that remained of the guard to warding the castle’s granaries, so wasn’t anyone to stop them or drag them to the crossroads. Hadden shared out grain to the borough kings as he saw fit, which kept them mostly doing what he wanted.

In the fourth year after the black sky, we finally had a proper springtime. The river turned rampant and spilled over the levees and flooded all of the southwash. A lot of people died in the flood itself, and from cholera and black-fly fever after that. The waters didn’t drain back out of the southwash for three months, and by then everything there was rot and ruin. 

None of it particularly mattered to me. I was Serrik’s kennel-keeper and private healer, which was enough of a position to keep me fed and keep a roof over me. It was a better life than a lot of people led, after the world came to an end. 

Went on like that until my twenty-second year before everything changed again.


	3. Lacero

I was in traction when the world ended. 

I’d been torn up badly in the taking of the castellum we were at, my left arm practically hanging off at the shoulder. Had my feet up while I was on the mend, me and a couple dozen others of my cohort, and some from a few other cohorts. We were all of

us waiting for orders from higher up the chain of command regarding what we ought to do next, having successfully taken another stronghold.

None of us were any kind of prepared for the ground to start shaking. 

The castellum we were in was shaken to pieces by the heaving ground. Part of a wall fell in on our campus in the central bailey, and the last thing I knew was getting my face smashed.

I hadn’t expected to wake up again.

I did anyway.

Awake,  _ hungry _ , blood-smell nearby. Corpse. Crawled over to it and ate everything down to the bone marrow before dropping into blackness again. 

Awake again. Stronger, able to get to my feet, staggered around until I found another corpse and ate that too. 

I didn’t know how long it went on like that, but when I was hale enough, I clawed my way out of the mess of smashed logs and plaster and stone and began looking for others who weren’t dead. Everything was a muddle, those first days, but I managed to scratch together thirty or so other homunculi who were glad enough to follow me until we found a proper Primus or Praetor or something. We never did find anyone of rank, though - nobody who knew what the lot of us ought to be doing. Nobody who knew what the fuck had happened. The sky was black by day and night, and the air smelled sulfur-foul, and there wasn’t anybody alive who wasn’t an homunculus.

There was plenty to eat, at first, because of all the fresh corpses lying on the ground. Ought to have been dog-soldiers gathering them up in wagons to be brought to a veneficus for making hollow men, but wasn’t any sign of them about. 

It wasn’t until the meat ran out that I got the idea to try and march everyone back to the dug-in campus where we’d massed before the battle. 

At the camp, we joined up with others - more homunculi, but cobali and men too. No hollow men; all of those had fallen and didn’t seem like they’d be getting up again. Weren’t any of the men Venifici or  Primae or Praetori or anything - just the kind of dog-soldiers who were good for nothing but digging trenches and keeping fires lit and shit like that. Still, they were useful enough to have around, especially when winter came. Didn’t have half bad ideas about what needed doing, when it came to it. 

All told, we had forty-four homunculi, and fifty-three men, and twelve cobali. 

We were all that was left of a legion of five thousand. 

Most of the men and cobali were pissant cowards, afraid to even  _ talk _ to the homunculi, but there were a couple who had the stones for it. They took charge of the mannish and cobali sides of things, like I’d took charge of homunculus matters. 

I got to talking to them, of a night, more than once. 

The men were called Brunus and Valentus, the cobali was called  Linea,  and they’d all been slaves back in Mal Terram. Bought by the legion and made into dog soldiers, might have become liberati someday. They knew everything about anything, and come to find it was mostly because they’d each been alive for the better part of  _ forty years _ . The oldest of the homunculi were something like three years old. A fair number of the ones we had were fresher than that, still dim-eyed and slavering. 

Brunus and Valentus and Linea, shockingly, didn’t give a single fuck about the glory of  Estiennos Rex.  I learned a lot about the world from those two, talking of a night.

“So this is twenty years on, now,” Brunus was saying, “Val and me, we both came on the same ship from Mal Terram, packed off for pissing off the rex - that’s Constantius Rex, mind, not Estiennos Rex. Back in Mal Terram a body who pissed off the rex in some way’d either get his head cut off or get branded as a slave. Except it gets to be that there’s more slaves in Mal Terram than there’s work for us, so someone in charge gets the bright idea to ship the sorry lot of us off to Nova Terram and make us useful in coal mines and sawmills and that. Had us a Praetor and guards and all to keep us in line - didn’t think twice about hanging a man who made any sort of trouble. Ships would come, now and again, to bring more prisoners and haul the fruits of our labors back to Nova Terram. So here’s half a dozen years gone by since me and Val got dropped off, when by and comes a ship and they’ve already had themselves a mutiny! Here’s Estiennos, puff and proud, and he’s a Veneficus Magna, and he’s already raised up all the folks who’ve died as hollow men and used them to take charge of things. Takes over the whole colony, doesn’t he just, and then the jangle-brained fuck declares that he’s Estiennos Rex and he’s going to raise an army of monsters - that’d be you lot- and conquer the whole world. My guess is the gods weren’t pleased by that, because of the earth heaving and the maelstrom and the ash falling out of the sky and the sky being black and all.

So now here we are, even more fucked than we were before, no way to get back to Nova Terram - and who knows if anybody’’s alive there anywise - and sure as  _ fuck _ no way to get back to Mel Terram.”

“Know what I say?” Valentus said, taking a pull from a jug of wine we’d found in the campus’ stores, “Fuck the Rex. Fuck the whole idea of them all together. Fuck difference does it make who the rex of Nova Terram is to a man that mines coal? Fuck does it matter who the rex of Mal Terram is, even? We’re here now, I say we dig in and make this place ours. If the vilius here don’t like it, fuck them too. We build us a spot here where every man’s equal and every man’s got a say about anything that concerns him. Like one-eyed Lyco said, back in Mal Terram, ‘fore they hanged him.”

“Now  _ there’s _ something I’ll drink to,” Brunus agreed, taking the jug.

If it’d just been us homunculi holding up in the camp, we probably wouldn’t have made it through the winter.  The dog-soldiers didn’t make half-bad Primae, some of them. Set us training at new things, like gathering firewood and cooking meals and that. Any of mine who balked at doing dog-soldier work got a solid thrashing. Didn’t happen more than a couple of times, though - wasn’t as much cause for us to scrap with eachother as there had been when there’d been watchers to impress. Nobody barking orders at all, really - the men and cobali were by and large too scared shitless of us to do anything but ask nicely if we’d like to do this or that thing, please,  _ sir _ . 

There being so few of us left alive, we had space enough for the lot of us to spread out; wasn’t at all hard for two or three fellows to find an empty spot to fuck eachother without a crowd of onlookers, if they felt like it.

I found that I quite often felt like it, with anyone who was game. 

I hadn’t much been up for that kind of thing, when there’d been watchers. Before we’d lost the battle, fucking had always been about showing dominance or seeking favor. A weaker fellow who was good with his mouth could rally a stronger one to fight by his side, and that. Wrestling someone manfully to the ground and getting him pinned might turn into more than that, and everyone liked a show. Back then, there’d been others muscling for rank who wouldn’t have hesitated to lay into me if I’d let my guard down even the smallest bit. I’d never have got all my kit off in front of anybody at all, back then.

Here and now, though… it was different. All I had to do was pick a likely-looking fellow and grin and ask ‘You up for a tussle?’ and we’d find some empty spot and have eachother off.

It was Linea who knew what was going on when I began to thicken at the waist. We both of us went straight away to Valentus and Brunus about it.

They were shocked dumb when I told them that one in three of the homunculi had cunts instead of cocks. That _ I _ had a cunt. They’d never seen any homunculi out of their kit. 

All three of them agreed that I was ‘pregnant’, that I was growing a new homunculus in my belly that’d come out when it was done. Like growing a homunculus in a vat, except  _ I _ was the vat. 

There was some wrong-footedness, for a bit, because the men reckoned that anyone with a cunt was a ‘woman’ and that ‘women’ weren’t supposed to be soldiers. I knocked a man’s front teeth out, and for a few days it seemed like the men and the homunculi were going to have to square up, but the cobali smoothed it all out somehow. It didn’t bother them who had a cock and who had a cunt; they knew that all of us were men. 

Anyway, a year or so on from the last battle, my belly started cramping so bad that I screamed and swore about it. Went on for what must have been hours, but eventually I pushed  a soft, wet, toothless handful of a thing out of my cunt.

I felt immediately and incomprehensibly protective of the thing, ready to rip out the throat of anyone who meant it harm.

Linea said it was a ‘baby’ - that it’d likely grow to be just like any of the rest of us, given enough time. Didn’t seem likely to me, because I’d seen other homunculi fresh out of the vats and they weren’t ever small and soft like the one I’d pushed out of my cunt. A lot of the other fellows who were swelling at the middle wanted to have a good look at the thing, and insisted that it wasn’t to be torn to pieces for parts like it’d have been in the vat rooms. Turned into a really proper scrap with one or two of the unnamed lads, and I had to step in and thrash them bloody about it, but it was all settled after that. 

The men and the cobali insisted that making babies was the proper way to go about making new folks. That it was how men did it, and only those as had cunts could grow babies inside of them, and only those as had cocks could plant them there, and that it was fucking that did the planting. A lot of us thought that was shit, because we’d fucked plenty back in the barracks and hadn’t anyone got pregnant. But Linea said that we’d probably been dosed with some kind of chemiae by the Venifici, and it was true that they doled out a particular draught to all of us every morning, so maybe there was something to it. 

My baby was the first, but not the last. There were a dozen new mouths that needed feeding by the time we’d run through the stores at the campus. The men told me that we ought to follow the road deeper inland, find a different castellum that we knew’d been taken. That a castellum be a properly defensible location, more than the campus, and that a castellum and its outlands would have all the kit needed for ‘farming’. Didn’t any of the homunculi know fuck all about the making of food, but a good number of the men and the cobali did. 

So when there was fuck all left to eat in the stores, we all of us scratched up anything useful that could be had from the campus and began marching east.


	4. Cruentus

I was already well and truly fucked by the time the world ended.

I was under Primus Sidonius, back when. Not anyone special, just a middle-of-the-pack member of a cohort. Earned a name for myself when I tore out the throat of a vilius man who’d put a dagger in his side. I was at Primus Sidonius’s side for the taking of Drammeldown.

I was there when the vilius men took Drammeldown back.

The vilius men gathered up anyone who wasn’t dead and sold us off as slaves. I fought tooth and nail, at the beginning - we all did. But the vilius slavers knew their work; knew how to break a will. Most of the slaves in whatever vilius city it was that they brought us to were cobali, and come to find a lot of them had been born free to local clans living in the forests and hills.

It didn’t take long for the vilius men to work out that homunculi would round from any injury at all, so long as our lodestones weren’t crushed. Meant that they could chain us to a wall and whip us until we were flayed, could break our bones and kick in our teeth and put out our eyes with hot pokers, and we’d heal up fit to work. That we wouldn’t die of cold, so they could chain us outside. That we didn’t die of hunger, so we could be kept on the meanest of rations.

So after a while, when I’d worked out that cussing and fighting wasn’t worth it, when I worked out that the easiest way to spare myself pain and trouble was to keep my head down and follow the orders I was given, they put me to market.

I got bought by some kind of vilius Primus who used me to rip into the wild cobali. It was easy enough work - find a steading, slaughter anyone bearing arms, drag the rest back to a city to be broken by the slavers. I tried not to think on it, mostly. Tried not to think on anything at all. Thinking wasn’t what I was for - I was a weapon, and I always had been, and all I had to do was follow the orders of whoever was wielding me. Weapons don’t make choices about the right or wrong of the tasks they’re put to. My purpose was to do what I was told.

The day the sky went black was just like any other day, for me. The only difference it made to me that spring didn’t come was being more cold than usual, going weeks on end without any food being put in me. I passed hand to hand through a lot of different masters. Years went on like that. 

My master was the captain of a mercenary company that made its living guarding traders on the road. The traders and the company were waylaid by bandits one night, and someone was barking orders at me as soon as I woke up again from being dead or something like it. He used me to kill the other bandits, to keep ripping out throats until he was the only one left alive. Gave me leave to eat my fill from the corpses after, which was a finer thing than anything else that’d happened to me within memory. 

He told me his name was Issmil, and that I belonged to him. I didn’t argue, because I knew better than that  _ and _ because I had a belly full of meat and leave to kneel next to him by a fire. He had me keep watch while he slept, on orders to wake him if anything happened. Sleep became a thing I got in bits and snatches of idleness. Issmil used me to waylay a few different travellers on the road, massing a horde of gold and goods. When he decided that he had enough, he broke camp and set off along the road with me at heel. More than once we were accosted by bandits, but he had me kill them. 

He let me eat them. 

It was several days of travel before we reached Haddenskeep, which was where things changed.


	5. Lacero

We never made it to the castellum in the east. We were waylaid by local cobali. 

They’d stuck the guards with little blow-pipe needles, laid them out flat, but they were still breathing. They could have used the kind of poison that just made us dead, if they’d wanted. But they hadn’t. They wanted to talk to the chiefest among us, wanted to know who we were and what we were up to. Wasn’t a lot of talk before Brunus and Valentus and Linea and me declared we could talk for the lot of us. 

When the cobali learned that all we wanted to do was go to the fortress, they told us that there wasn’t anything there worth having - just ruin and corpses. The same thing had happeed there that’d happened everywhere else, the castellum shaken to bits. They told us that there’d been half a dozen homunculi survivors, and that they’d pledged to the cobali clan.

What else was there to do but pledge ourselves, too? 

Their first concern was that none of the cobali with us were slaves. We told them that wasn’t  _ anybody _ in our band a slave anymore, that we were all free men who didn’t follow any rex, and they liked that very much. 

Everyone at the steading they brought us back to - which was more like an arming campus than a steading, really - gawped like dead fish when they learned that we had homunculi babies with us. Hadn’t anything like that happened to the six of them that’d pledged before us, because the only one with a cunt was the biggest and meanest cuss of the lot and he didn’t particularly like getting fucked.

There were only a spare handful of the vilius cobali that could speak lingua vulgaris, but the homunculi who’d been living with them this past year’d got good at the lingua cobali, what they called ‘Laithe’. Their word for cobali was ‘goblyn’. Their clan was called Kravdarach.

The goblyns couldn’t square with the fact that most of the homunculi didn’t have names… so they went ahead and gave a name to anyone who didn’t have one. They even insisted that the babies ought to have names! 

Mine was called Brathu. 

Brunus and Valentus had been right about the babies; they grew bigger so long as we kept putting food in them. That wasn’t as easy as it ought to have been, according to the goblyns - they said that it ought to have been ‘spring’ by now, that it should have been getting warmer, trees should have been waking up and such. But winter just went on and on. 

The sky was black at night and gray by day, Ash and snow fell out of the sky from time to time, by turns. We had to pick up camp and move every few weeks to find new grazing for the goats, to find game and roots and what-all else could be had. In the fourth year after the black there was finally a spring, even what might charitably be called a summer, and everyone rejoiced about it. 

The first raiding band of men came on us by night, putting arrows into the throats of the watchers first so they couldn’t raise an alarm. They made for the storehouse, killing anyone who was in their way. They hadn’t accounted for their being homunculi among the goblyns. 

We slaughtered them. None of the goblyns or the men in our clan wanted to eat the meat that we butchered from their corpses, but they didn’t try to stop us homunculi from doing it.

We mourned our dead and pulled up camp and went somewhere else.

When Brathu got big enough that he didn’t want milk anymore, I started growing _another_ brat inside me. When he came out, I named him Minog. 

We spent the best part of seven years learning how to do dog-soldier sorts of things. How to harvest nuts, how to pull fish out of the river, how to mind pigs and goats, how to spin and weave and make baskets, how to put food by. Things that really, properly,  _ needed _ doing. We met with other goblyn clans and traded with them. Some of them had homunculi among them too, and Terrani men. Seemed the goblyns didn’t get on with the vilius men - that vilius men raided goblyn steading to take goods and capture folks as slaves. Every time we ran foul of vilius men, men that the goblyns said were called Kandish, we killed them.

Soon enough the biggest of the brats were scrambling around underfoot, getting in everyone’s way, wanting to know everything about anything. They joined up with the goblyn brats and the mannish ones in whatever they were about. They got to speaking Laithe faster and better than any of my soldiers, too, and all the men seemed to think that was perfectly natural. 

We all of us learned other things, too, from the goblyns - songs and stories. The history of the goblyns and their clans, how the first men had come from the southern ocean from some other land called Kand that’d sunk under the ocean. The goblyns had been here first, they said, but the men ran ruin over them whenever they met, carted them back to mannish strongholds to be slaves, slaughtered any who fought back. They were damned glad to have us on their side, because it more than evened the odds.

It was at a meeting of clans that we learned there was a Kandish steading south of us that still had its walls, that it was where the Kandish raids were mostly coming from. After a bit of talk, it was decided that the smartest thing to do would be to take it, like we’d taken so many castelli before, and make it a holdfast for goblyns and homunculi and any men who wanted to pledge to us.

We spent all of that winter preparing, and when the spring came I chose thirty homunculi to fight under me, leaving the others to defend the goblyns and the brats and all. Sixty men joined us, and something like a hundred goblyns. 

We started marching in springtime.


	6. Nemmash

The dog was going to lose the eye no matter what I did. They'd had to use the breaking sticks to get the dogs apart – it wasn't supposed to have been a death match, but the other dog had gone into a blood rage and stopped listening to its owner. It was dead now, because this bitch was the gamer dog. She was growling menacingly as I carefully laid my hand on the ruined flesh of her face, but too weak to actually do much.

“You'd best keep that bitch alive, or I fucking swear I'll let Riptooth maul you, you little shit,” the dog's owner was shouting from the stand, where Serrik was holding him back. I knew Serrik wouldn’t let that happen; I was too useful for him to let me be maimed.

I closed my eyes and reached inward, calling up the threads of magic to force the dog's flesh to knit back together. Stopped the bleeding, mended the cracked skull, pulled the fever out of her brain. If the brain kept on swelling a dog could die of it even hours later; I'd had to learn that by trial and error. As far gone as this dog was, it probably would have been kinder for me to put an end to her, but Serrik would flog me if she died under my hands. Wasn’t anyone to stop him doing that kind of thing, these days - wasn't a lot of difference between a servant and a slave. I'd nowhere else to go.

By the time I was done, the dog was going to live. She was going to be a one-eyed fighting bitch with a truly wicked scar across her face, but it she was going to live. The owner could still breed from her, which was probably what he really cared about.

The breakers had got rid of the crowd by the time I was done, and I mumbled something to the dog's owner about feeding her some liver to build her blood back up, but I didn't know if he heard me or cared. I stumbled back to my workroom to wash the blood off my hands, and Serrik let me. Healing work always left me weary and weak, but it needed doing.

“Scrap?” a voice called as I was dumping the bloodied water into the sewer-ditch out back. “You got half a minute?”

I turned to find Idda standing there, wringing her hands around a bloody rag.

“I've got until Serrik needs me for something else,” I said. “What do you need?”

“It's one of the goblins. He's got a fever. I can't tell what's wrong with him because he's not talking Kand; keeps jabbering on in his own tongue. I think he said something about teeth?”

“Where's he at?”

“In the kitchen. Didn't want Serrik to see him in this state.”

I nodded, setting the empty bucket against the wall as I followed her back inside.

The goblin in question was one that I only knew in passing. They were by and large clannish and nasty to men, but Idda was sweet to everyone. Nobody hated Idda.

There was a younger goblin sitting next to the older one, holding a wet cloth to his forehead. They were chattering to one another in their own tongue. It was the younger one who turned and spoke to me.

“He say he don't want anything from you dogfuckers, but he been spitting pus for a week. He too old for this shit, and bossman finds out he sick, he gonna use him for dog meat. You a healer, yah?”

“Yes. Move over, let me have a look. I'll need to lay hands on him. Tell him not to bite me,” I said to the younger goblin, waiting for him to relay the message in his own tongue. “Idda, do you have a bottle of whitewash? I know you use it to put things by sometimes.”

“I'll see. Hard to lay hands on lately, and if any of Serrik’s men find out I’ve got it, they’ll take it from me to drink and punish me for having hid it.”

“Bless you,” I said as she left.

The young goblin helped me force the old one’s jaw open. One of his back teeth was rotten, and there was a swollen pocket of foulness at the root of it that had been digging its way into his jaw. It was open, under his tongue, angry and red with blood-rot.

I worked the rotten tooth out with the strength of my fingers. It came away without much effort, blood and pus flowing in its wake. I reached inward with my magic and concentrated on the goblin's blood, on the foulness and the dead, rotting wrongness. He stopped fighting us after a few moments, resigned to receiving help.

By the time Idda got back with a little bottle of whitewash, I had the wound drained and closed, and the fever cooled. I felt like someone had sucked half the life out of me, but that would pass - especially if I got a meal in me.

I poured a bit of the whitewash onto a scrap of linen I’d folded into packing.

“Tell him to bite on this, and to wash his mouth out with clean water every chance he gets,” I told the younger goblin. “There's a hollow space where the tooth's roots used to be; if it starts filling up with pus again you need to come to me. He could get blood-rot and die from this if it's not looked after proper.”

“Thank you,” the younger goblin said. The older one just glared at me.

I washed my hands again and Idda brought me a bowl of mashed turnips with pork fat, which I was painfully thankful for.

I was just finishing it when Serrik shouted for me from the taproom. I wanted this day to be done, wanted to collapse into bed, but I knew better than to ignore a shout from Serrik. If he had to come find me, it would go badly.

Serrik was sitting at a table when I got there, and there was another man with him.

There was a Terranish warbeast standing behind the other man.

I'd never seen a warbeast before, not in the flesh, but I’d heard enough stories to know it couldn't be anything else. It was better than seven feet tall, and a yard across the shoulders. Its skin was a middling brown, just lighter than my own, but sooty with filth. Its ears were like a goblin's, long and pointed, pressed backwards like an affronted cat's at the moment. It was wearing a kind of muzzle that covered the bottom part of its face, the iron lattice rusted and flaking. It was sparsely dressed for how cold it was - just a pair of knee breeches and a leather vest with no shirt beneath, both badly worn and filthy. Its feet were bare, its toes bearing wicked claws. Its hands were clawed, too. The knuckles of its right hand were raw, split, swollen. I'd heard somewhere that warbeasts had black blood, but the blood oozing from its split knuckles was as red as any man's or goblin’s.

It was an impressive creature, but I had a healer's eye. The lay of its bones told me that it should have been bulkier than it was; its muscles were wasting. There was a kind of filminess to its skin, a dull distance to its ink-black eyes. I wouldn't have been at all surprised to find that it was fevered.

“Scrap, this's Issmil. Former solider, like me, so you'd best show some fucking respect. There's something wrong with his beast. See to it.”

It stood there like a statue as I took a breath and came forward. Kept its eyes fixed someplace on the far wall, just staring off like none of us were there. I tried to keep my hand from trembling as I stretched myself and reached up to lay it across the warbeast's forehead. It was fever-hot. I moved my hand down to its breastbone and reached in with magic, feeling out what was wrong.

“I can tell you right now, sir, that it's got a kind of lung-rot. I'll want to get it in a work room, somewhere I can lay it out on a table,” I said. “It'll need to be clean, and the muzzle will have to come off, so I can look in its throat. What's it been eating lately?”

“It hain't, not for the last three days,” Issmil said gruffly. “My mam always told me you starve a fever.”

I knew better than to contradict the advice of a soldier's mother. I just made a humming noise of understanding.

“Am I allowed to feed it, sir?” I asked.

“You can do whatever you need to get it into fighting fit for tomorrow night,” he said. “Me and your master here've got a deal.”

Serrik wasn’t my  _ master _ . But I didn’t correct the soldier about that, either.

“Then with your permission, sir, I'd like to take it to my workroom downstairs, near the kennels. You can collect it when you're ready for it.”

Issmil got up and unlocked the muzzle, tossing it on the table with a heavy thump. The warbeast stretched its jaw in a yawn, revealing its teeth… they weren't at all mannish, more like a wild pig's, with a double pair of vicious tusks. The kind of teeth meant to tear flesh apart.

Issmil put his hand around the warbeast’s throat without really squeezing, and said,

“Look at me.”

The warbeast obeyed, sluggishly turning its gaze, looking Issmil in the eyes.

“You do what this healer says, answer any questions he asks you, don't give him any fucking trouble. He asks you to do anything that's against your standing orders, you come to me and I'll clear things up.”

The warbeast said, in a voice like raked gravel,

“Yes, Master.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that warbeasts were capable of thought and speech. I sucked a breath through my teeth at the revelation.

Issmil looked at me and said, “It understands Kand just fine, so don't worry about that. If it's getting stroppy with you, come and find me and I'll make it listen. Most healers won't even look twice at it, but someone told me that the pitmaster here had a healer on hand who wasn’t squeamish about animals, so here we are.”

“Scrap does as he's told,” Serrik said, looking at me with a dangerous hardness in his eyes.

“It's no trouble at all, sir,” I said, bowing a bit in deference. “I'll see to it immediately, if that's alright.”

“I don’t care when you do it, so long as it’s sorted for tomorrow night,” Issmil said. “It'll follow you now I've told it to.”

I looked up at the warbeast, my mouth feeling dry.

“Come on then,” I said, tossing my head toward the back stairs.

The warbeast followed me when I started walking.


	7. Cruentus

I watched the man that I'd been ordered to follow, sizing him up as he led me down the stairs, past the rank stench of the kennels. He was all gristle and sinew. Tall, for a man, but knobby and narrow, probably didn't weigh ten stone. Skin just a little darker than most of the other men hereabouts, like maybe he was partly Arat or something. With the lay of his eyes and cheekbones, it wouldn't have surprised me at all to learn that he had goblin blood a few generations back, but that wasn't the sort of thing that one mentioned to men unless one felt like having one's teeth kicked in.

All things being equal, I could have picked him up and broken him over my knee. Looked like he knew that, too, because he was twitchy as a deer, wide eyed and swallowing hard every time he looked over his shoulder at me.

The room he brought me to was small, and it stank like blood and chemiae. Had herbs hanging from the ceiling, and a shelf of jars and bottles and things that took up a whole wall. So this man was absolutely some kind of vilius Venificus, then. Mage, that was the Kandish word for it. From the way my master and the other man had talked, he was also a slave or somethign like. 

“Take your clothes off and lie on that table,” the mage ordered. “I've got some things to get ready, you just lie still.”

He hadn't told me where to put my clothes, so I just let them fall on the floor. My back made a cracking noise as I laid flat, and my head swam a little bit. I closed my eyes and breathed hard. If I could just be allowed to lay still like this for a while, it would probably do me a world of good.

“I'm going to touch you,” the mage said a while later, his voice soft and just shy of trembling. “Your forehead, and your throat, and your chest. It won't hurt.”

It wasn't a question, so there was nothing for me to answer. I blinked at him, nodding to show that I understood. His hands were smooth – soft and warm, the fingers long and small. So careful as they touched me, so light and hesitating. He put his fingertips on my temples, his thumbs on my brow. I felt magic flowing from him, from his thumbs to his fingertips, passing through my flesh on its way. I sighed as the pounding in my head eased, melting away from moment to moment.

I hadn't been  _ healed _ before, not by mannish magic. Hadn’t know it was a thing that could be done. Tried to remind myself that it was my master’s kindness and mercy that had me laying here under the mage’s attentions.

He put his hands on my throat, and I couldn't help flinching, but he didn't even try to throttle me. He ran both hands downward, thumbs tucking in at the notch in my collarbone for just a moment before they were pressing lightly against my breastbone, his fingers splayed out along my ribs. His hands were so bloody  _ warm _ .

“You're too thin, more than three days of starvation accounts for. You having a hard time keeping food down?”

“No,” I answered.

“Were you eating well before he started trying to starve the fever out of you?”

“My master feeds me as he sees fit.”

He made a dissatisfied noise and took his hands off me.

I could hear him fiddling with things, glass things and metal things, the scrape of a mortar and pestle. I could smell sharp herbs and hard spirits.

“Don't move. I'm going to fetch some water. I'll be back right away,” he said, like he owed me an explanation about anything. I closed my eyes and laid there and soaked up the warmth. Between being warm and getting to lie down and not feeling like something was trying to hammer its way out of my head, this was something worth basking in. It was quiet enough that I could hear my own rattling breath.

I was half asleep when he came back, but I snapped alert quick. He was carrying two pails on a yoke.

“Can you sit up?” he asked, pouring water from one pail into the other, leaving one full and one empty. I answered with action, struggling to a sitting position. I had to hunch to avoid the bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling. Even hunching, I towered over him.

I watched him set both pails on the table, watched him ladle out some steaming water into a bowl and pour whatever was in his mortar into it, watched him add something else from a narrow bottle. He turned around with the bowl in hand and said,

“Breathe the steam from this, deep as you can.”

He held the steaming bowl under my face. The smell was overpowering, sharp enough to make my eyes sting, but my master had bound me to follow his orders. Being churlish would just bring Issmil down on me. Might bring this mage down on me too, which might be worse than Issmil. 

The need to cough was sudden and overwhelming, but the mage seemed to expect it, moving with swiftness to whisk the bowl out of the way and replace it with the empty pail as I hunched over and hacked out a stuttering stream of thick, yellow foulness. The mage put his hand on the nape of my neck as I did, but he didn't grip tightly or push or pull or give me any other clue as to what he wanted from me. He kept switching between pail and bowl, making me breath the steam. When my coughing stopped bringing anything up, he said,

“I'm going to put my other hand on your chest now. It won't hurt.”

Didn't know why he kept on saying that, as if it mattered whether it was going to hurt or not. He kept his hand on the back of my neck, pulling me down until I was hunched almost double, guiding me into the position he wanted. Moved his hand down a bit from my nape, to a place between my shoulders. His other hand tucked under the hollow of my ribs.

“Breathe out, long as you can. Make yourself empty,” the mage ordered. When I couldn't breathe out anymore, he said, “Now breathe in, deep.”

When I did, he poured magic into me.

That breath left me as a sobbing moan, because I couldn't remember anything ever feeling so nice as the magic flowing between his hands. He didn't tell me not to, so I took several more breaths, deep and even and not scratching or rattling at all. It was months since I'd been able to breathe without it hurting. I felt dizzy and faint with it, and put my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands to steady myself. Noticed after a minute or two that his hand was running up and down my back. Feeling out the knobby bits of my spine. That felt nice, too. I wouldn't have minded at all if he just kept on with that forever.

“That should have sorted the worst of it,” he said. “Rinse your mouth out with this and then spit into the bucket,” he said, handing me a bottle. Whatever was in it tasted like herbs and hard spirit, and it made the inside of my mouth numb. I wondered if drinking it would have made everything else feel numb too - which would have been nice - but he'd ordered me to spit.

“I'm going to get rid of this,” he said, looking at the contents of the bucket and wrinkling his nose. “If I bought you food, would you be able to eat it?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to ignore the harsh twisting in my belly at the suggestion that I might be fed.

“I'll go get something, then. While I'm gone, I want you to wash as best you can. Being filthy can make you sick in the first place, and if you're already sick it can keep you that way and make it worse. Pay special attention to that hand; I'll have a look at that when I get back. You have any other open wounds?”

“Not any I know about,” I said. Wasn't a thing I thought about often, because there wasn't ever anything for me to do about it except wait until they sorted themselves. 

“I'll give you a good look over when I get back,” he said.

He put a piece of linen in my hand, and gestured toward the other bucket, the steaming one. There was a waxy lump of soap sitting next to it.

Washing felt indecently good. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been allowed soap or hot water. Never while in Issmil's charge, I was sure of that. I'd never seen him bathe. The water was murky by the time I'd got done, and I hadn't even tried to bother about my hair. It needed cutting off, really. I probably had fleas.

I laid back down on the table once I was as clean as I was like to get, because he hadn't told me not to. Warmer and more comfortable than I was generally allowed. I closed my eyes and basked in it, because this kind of thing would surely not last.


	8. Nemmash

Serrik was still talking to Issmil when I went back into the taproom, and I heard him mention me. It never meant anything good when Serrik was talking about me - it was better for me to be below anyone's notice. I stopped to listen a bit, to see if it was something worth worrying over.

“Nah, nothing squeamish left in Scrap, saw to that,” Serrik said, taking a quaff. “He's gone shoulder-deep in a birthing cow and cleaned shit out of gut wounds and all that. Puts his hands all over the dogs all the time. Can't see as he'd find anything about your monster specially bothersome.”

That was the closest Serrik ever got to singing my praises, actually. Still, I made a point of avoiding his notice as I passed through to the kitchen. Idda was still there, peeling turnips and dropping them into a pot of water.

“I'd have thought you'd be sleeping by now, Scrap. What's happened?” she asked, wiping her hands on her apron.

“That man who came in after the fight, the one with Serrik now? He's got a warbeast under him. I've been put to healing it.”

Her eyes went wide at the mention of a warbeast, and she drew a sharp breath. When she spoke, though, it was only to ask,

“What do you need?”

I left the kitchens with two bowls of stew and a jug of dark ale and a whole loaf of yesterday's bread. Serrik would flog me about it if he found out, but he wasn’t likely to find out.

The warbeast was asleep when I got back to my workroom. He looked as worn as I felt, and it seemed positively cruel to wake him up, but he badly needed to eat and I had no idea when he'd be allowed to again.

Still, I ate my own bowl of stew and had a few swigs of ale before waking him. I didn't have a name to call him by, and I didn't want to be within reach when he woke, so I settled for standing by the door and shouting, “Wake up!”

His eyes opened immediately, but everything else about him stayed still. His eyes were black as ink, the whites of them sallow and bloodshot.

“You need to eat,” I said. “Sit up.”

He didn't answer me, but he followed my orders. He moved like a thing in pain, no motion or energy wasted. He looked at the tray I was holding, intense longing in his gaze.

“I don't know what your sort usually eat,” I faltered. “I should've asked...”

“I eat what's given to me,” the warbeast said. It had a voice like raked gravel, deep and growling, making the hairs on the back of my neck rise. Some deep, primal part of me knew that it was a dangerous sound, something I should run from. I clenched my teeth and stepped toward it instead, holding the tray in front of me like a talisman.

“Eat as much of that as you can, and drink the ale. If you think you're going to be sick, tell me so I can get a bucket. I'd rather you didn't retch on my floor.”

He made a noise of agreement, then began dispatching the stew the same way I had, ripping off pieces of bread and using them to sop it up. I watched as he used one wicked fang to scrape wayward gravy from the undersides of his claws before putting his fingers into his mouth and sucking the last remaining traces of it from them. He licked the bowl, too, utterly shameless, then spent an especially long time sucking on each of his split knuckles.

“I can heal those, if you want,” I said.

He didn't speak, but answered by putting down the bowl and extending his hand to me. I took it between my own, which looked frail and childish in comparison to his. He made a quiet noise of appreciation as I tugged on the threads of magic and willed his flesh back to wholeness, a rumbling purr. The sound sent a shiver down my back.

“What's your name?” I asked, the words out before I could even consider them. It was a stupid thing to ask, not any of my business. I didn't know if warbeasts even  _ had _ names.

“I answer to whatever it pleases my master to call me,” he said, drawing his hand away from me and curling it into a fist, his eyes cast down.

“What was your name before? Before you were...captured, I mean,” I faltered. It was stupid to be curious about that kind of thing. The warbeast glanced at me for a bare moment, something dark and unfathomable in his black eyes, and looked away again.

“Cruentus,” he said, more softly than I'd have thought him capable of. “My Primus named me Cruentus.”

It was a Terranish word, but I didn’t know what it meant.

“If you're done with me, I should go back to my master,” he said, sounding weary and broken.

“I'm  _ not _ done with you,” I said, firm as I could manage. “I was told to put you back into working order, and you're certainly not that yet. You should sleep. He'll come for you when he wants you, I'm sure. Serrik always comes for me.”

The warbeast snorted, as if I'd said something funny, but he laid back down. I fetched out a blanket for him from the trunk, draping it over him. It felt wrong not to offer him a bed, but the only one I had was my own pallet, and he'd never have fit.

Having ongoing orders meant that I wasn't obliged to go and ask Serrik what I ought to be doing. I doused all the lamps but one and curled up on my pallet and stared at the warbeast laying on my worktable, watching the rise and fall of his chest until sleep took me.

The next day went on like any other day; I fed the dogs and checked each of them to make sure they were fit for fighting, slopped the kennels and scattered new sawdust in the fighting ring. Fights began after high noon and kept on until long after dark. Dogs on dogs, mostly, but we had all sorts of bouts in our ring. Dogs on bears and boars, dogs on swarms of rats. Dogs on goblins or men. Goblins and men on each other. Sometimes to first blood, sometimes to the death.

Serik liked to have me on hand during fights, to see to any dogs that needed it right away. He charged for the service, told me which dogs to save and which to let suffer. We had a pack of regulars here, locals who bred and trained fighting dogs. Morning hours before the ring opened were used for training; fighting dogs set on bait to teach them killing rage.

Serik charged kennel fees, and fight fees, and admission fees. He kept a hand in the gambling, sometimes. He kept the taproom and the kitchen. King Hadden  _ liked _ Serrik, liked to come and see the fights. It kept his men entertained, as much as Tellara and her girls did. Made men want to come to Haddenskeep and pledge to him and defend the place from raiders - not that there’d been raiders in years. Everyone knew that King Hadden was the bloodthirstiest warlord around. He sent out raiding parties of his own to catch anyone nosing around his borders and either put them to work or stuck their heads on pikes in Market Square. 

I was cleaning up the ring after Katsa's daily run, which by tradition opened the day's games. Katsa was a scrappy little feist that could kill twenty rats in a minute. Her owner paid street brats to bring him lively rats every morning. I took away the little corpses and distributed them in the kennels, because a taste of fresh blood always made the bully dogs gamer.

Issmil walked in, Cruentus at his heel.

Cruentus was wearing his short breeches, but he didn't have anything in the way of a shirt. He looked markedly better than he'd looked last night, but there was a cagey, shuttered air to him. He wasn't wearing the muzzle. He was free with baring his teeth at anyone who came to talk to Issmil.

I went about my duties, trying not to pay attention. It was never a good idea to pay too much attention to anyone or anything that was going to end up in the pit, because anyone and anything that ended up in the pit ended up dead sooner than later.

I was mopping the floor near the table where Issmil was presiding when I couldn't help overhearing a snatch of conversation.

“That mangey thing's nothing but bones,” one of the regulars said with a bark of laughter. “Old Riptooth'd have its guts on the floor inside five minutes.”

“Would you lay money on that?” Issmil taunted. “Because this is a warbeast, and warbeasts don't stop fighting unless they're ordered to.”

“Fuck off with that nonsense,” the regular scoffed. “A slave's a slave.”

Issmil reached into a fold of his cloak and pulled out a wicked little knife, the kind used for skinning rabbits. He handed it to Cruentus.

“Warbeast, cut the pad off your little finger and give it to the man,” Issmil said, not even looking at him.

I watched in absolute horror as Cruentus, ears back and snarling, did so. He held out the little sliver of flesh on the tip of the knife for the man to take, his wounded hand clenched in a fist at his side, blood seeping between his fingers.

“You want to introduce me to whoever it is that owns Riptooth?” Issmil said with a sharp-eyed grin, while the regular just stared at Cruentus' offering.

“Yeah. Yeah, alright,” he said. “If you'll let me put five bits on your beast.”

King Hadden and a few of his men turned up late in the evening, making a big show of it like they always did. Took the best seats near the pit and ordered a new cask of ale tapped, a mug sent to every man in the room. 

Being something of a novelty and a spectacle, Serrik’d arranged for Cruentus to be the last fight of the evening, the way he did when someone'd caught a bear for sport, or if there was a man being put to death. Gave him and Issmil and everyone else plenty of time to talk it up and place bets.

Riptooth was the king of the ring, just now. He'd killed half a dozen dogs and at least one goblin that I'd seen, and he'd made a bear back down and try to climb out into the stands. He was game enough that he'd go on fighting with two broken legs, if he was told to. He'd spent half the morning killing bait dogs, while Issmil was nursing his hangover and Cruentus was sleeping on my worktable.

Cruentus vaulted effortlessly over the wall, his face blank. His eyes were....empty. If I hadn't spent the late parts of night and the early parts of morning talking to him, I wouldn't have thought him capable of speech. He looked absolutely like an animal, a dull and vicious one at that.

Riptooth's owner was goading him, and he was fighting against his harness, growling and snapping, his teeth gleaming in the torchlight and already wet with blood. His eyes were streaming, his jaws foaming. Cruentus, at the other side of the ring, regarded him with cold emptiness.

Serrik rang the bell.

Riptooth's owner loosed him.

Cruentus dropped to all fours and sprang like a rock lion.

They met in a flurry of teeth and limbs. Cruentus’ left arm was pressed into Riptooth's mouth, his right hand gripping the back of Riptooth's neck as they rolled onto the floor, kicking up a wave of blood-wet sawdust. With an abrupt wrench and an apparent disregard for his own tearing flesh, Cruentus levered his arm up, forcing Riptooth to bear his throat.

Cruentus sank his teeth into it and pulled back, tearing Riptooth's throat out in a single, smooth motion. Riptooth released his arm with a gurgling hiss, blood spraying from his mouth and from the gaping wound of his throat. He fell, twitching, onto the floor of the ring. Cruentus stood, spitting out a mouthful of gristle. 

There was a long moment of silence before the crowd began shouting.

Cruentus looked at Issmil. Issmil nodded. Cruentus dropped to a crouch and used his claws to tear open Riptooth's belly. He reached into the wound he'd made, fishing around, reaching up between the ribs. His arm was slicked to the elbow with gore when he came away with the dog's heart in his fist and held it aloft.

Then he  _ ate _ it.

I quietly slipped out of the back of the kitchen to retch into the sewer-ditch.

It was a couple of hours later when I ran into Cruentus and Issmil again, after most of the crowd had gone. Issmil was holding court at Serrik's best table, flush with his winnings and several pints deep in ale.

Cruentus was kneeling at Issmil's feet while Issmil talked and laughed with Serrik and his inner circle. He was wearing the muzzle again. The flesh of his left arm was hanging in shreds, red and white and horrible. He was holding it cradled against his chest, staring glassy-eyed into some unknown distance, his breath quick and shallow.

I didn't generally approach Serrik's inner circle, not unless I got called there, but I set my jaw and took a breath and walked over, coming to Issmil's left side, opposite Cruentus.

“Forgive me for being a bother, sir,” I said, quietly, “But if you'd like, I could see to your warbeast’s injuries.”

“You're the one that sorted him last night, yeah?” Issmil asked, looking down at Cruentus.

“I usually charge two bits to have Scrap sort out one of the dogs,” Serrik said, looking sideways at me.

“The warbeast don't need it; it looks awful but it'll get better on its own,” Issmil said, taking a swig of his ale, “That’s how it is with them, they can heal up from anything as long as the little rock in the middle of their brains doesn’t get cracked. Nasty bit of magic-work, they are. Means you can flay them past what’d kill a goblin slave or a mannish one, though, so they’re easy enough to bring to heel.”

I looked at Cruentus. It was obvious, to me at least, that he was in pain.

“It wouldn't be a bother, sir,” I said, swallowing. “I like to be useful.”

“You keep Scrap on top of him, you can probably put him in the ring every night,” Serrik said. “If you cut me in for ten percent of the winnings, I won't charge you for kenneling or for Scrap's services. You ask any of the lads roundabouts, I keep a sound kennel. You're not going to find better. You got lodgings, yet?”

“Stayed at that hole across the way, last night, but I'm sure I can find better now-”

“You met Tellara? And her girls?” Serrik said, his voice sly as he looked across the taproom to where Tellara was sitting, running her finger round and round the top edge of her glass. “You'd need someplace to stow your beast - she don't let things like that in an establishment like hers. You ever been in a old-kingdom bath, Issmil?”

“And I'll find it the same place I found it this morning?” Ismil said, not looking away from Tellara.

“Of course. Fit and ready to fight again for tomorrow night.”

Issmil looked down at Cruentus and, nudging him with his foot, said “Well, you heard the man. Follow the healer, obey him, all the same shit I told you last night.”

“Yes, master,” Cruentus said, looking up to meet my eyes. His were clouded with pain, full of confusion. I tossed my head, and he dragged himself to his feet and fell into step behind me as I led him back toward the workroom.


	9. Cruentus

Nemmash laid hands on me again, and it was almost enough to have me purring.

Being allowed to lie the fuck down, away from everyone's eyes and useless chatter, just having this quiet man run his hands over me and take my hurts away... Hadn't anyone even asked him to, this time. He'd  _ wanted _ to. This kind of thing wasn't for the likes of me. This was the kind of thing men did for other men, not for weapons and tools. Made it hard to remember that I wasn’t a person and wasn’t supposed to be.

“There, that should be better,” he said, softly, stroking his fingertips along the freshly-closed flesh of my arm.

“Thank you,” I said. “You're alright, for a man. Hope Issmil tags on with your lot for a good long while, if it means he'll let you keep pawing at me. It's bloody  _ nice _ , having you paw at me.”

“Serrik's probably going to try to buy you from him, seeing the kind of money you pull in. If Issmil won’t sell you, he’s likely to end up murdered. Serrik's very good at getting what he wants.”

It didn’t matter to a weapon who wielded it. It wasn’t my place to have opinions about who my master was. To have opinions about how I’d rather be under Serrik if Serrik was the one who was letting Nemmash fix all my hurts. 

“You mind if I have another lie-down on your table here, since you've got me holed up and all?” I asked. Stupid of me to ask, since I hadn’t been given leave to beg for things. It was just... it wasn't often that I got a bit of peace and quiet and comfort. Wasn't often that anybody talked to me, either, and I hadn't known how badly I missed it.

I should have been sitting at my master's heel still, waiting to be told what to lay into. That's what I was for, what I'd always been for - the reason any homunculus was forged. We hadn’t been made to be talked at. It wasn't right that I should get a taste of this, of having someone treat me like a person. I wasn't a person, had to keep hold of that knowledge or I’d go mad with the wanting of things I couldn’t have.

“I wish I had a bed to offer you, but if you're happy with the table, have at,” the healer said, smiling a little.

Wasn't often a man smiled at me, not without it being the nasty kind that meant bloodsport and vengeance. Last who'd done it proper had been my Primus and my fellows, all those years ago before the world’d got fucked.

Nemmash’s smile set me wanting things I had no business wanting. I wanted, in a way that made my throat hot and tight, for Nemmash to run his hand up and down my back again.

I closed my eyes and held my breath until I slipped away into dark and quiet.

It went on like that for a handful of days; Issmil would come and get me from Nemmash’s workroom and keep me at heel while he took the day's bets, I'd slaughter something in the ring and sometimes get a bit banged up doing it, and Issmil would send me down to the kennels afterwards while he got drunk and dallied with whores. All things considered it was one of the better spots I’d found myself in since the war - indoors and warm practically all the time, getting meals on the regular, getting the attentions of a healer. I could feel myself getting stronger because of it, my insides sorting out things that’d been badly wrong for a long time. 

Just now, the taproom was still mostly empty. I'd learned, by keeping my ears open, that most of the men who came to holler at the fights were either King Hadden’s fighters, or craftsmen and farmers from the surrounding city. The fighting pit and the ale-hole it sat in passed for high culture, hereabouts.

I was muzzled and kneeling at Issmil's feet, waiting and resting up as best I could, when somebody spoke to me.

“Hey, warbeast, can you talk?” a woman's voice asked in hushed lingua vulgaris. I turned my ears back to listen, but didn't turn to look. From the noise behind me, she was maybe scrubbing the floor. I shook my head marginally, glancing up at Issmil. He was well and truly distracted by the harlot who was sitting on his knee.

“Figured maybe you couldn't,” she said. “Listen, then. Gonna be a thing happening, got people coming. Gonna be tonight. Been sneaking in and out this town for months now, dogfuckers don't ever look twice at goblins here. My clan and me, we're under Lacero's banner, gonna be coming through here and freeing all the slaves. Drowning this shithole in blood, taking it for ourselves. We’ve got homunculi in our clan. You in for it?”

I nodded fractionally, my breath catching.

“It'll be after midnight, when half these fucks have drunk themselves stupid. Be ready.”

“You, who the fuck are you?” the man who ran this ale hole was shouting. “Maggda's supposed to be doing that, where's she at?”

“Vikka, sir,” the goblin said in Kandish, her voice nasal and simpering. “Maggda's having the baby today, sir. She told me I was to do this or I'd get a thrashing, sir.”

“Well then get to it and stop nosing around the warbeast,” the man said, apparently satisfied with that answer.

The goblin girl moved off from me.

That night, after Nemmash had finished laying hands on me, I asked him,

“Is there anybody is this hole you wouldn't want to see dead?”

“That's a fucking _troubling_ thing to ask,” he said, going all sorts of still. Hardly even breathing, really, just looking at me sidelong.

“If I tell you why I asked it, I can trust you not to run off and shout about it, can't I?” I said, leaning back against the wall and looking at him hard. “Wouldn't half do for certain parties to get a whiff of what I might be about to say to you.”

“I never talk to anyone,” he whispered, “Except you, and that's only lately.”

“Little bird told me that there's maybe a horde of goblins going to come down out of the hills and drown this town in blood. That they’ve maybe got homunculi with them. That it's maybe going to happen tonight, in the small hours when nobody's expecting anything.”

“Can I go warn Idda, in the kitchen?” he asked, swallowing. “She looks after all the slaves, is all, and she's such a sweet sort. I'd want her out of the way if there was going to be fighting.”

“You can do whatever you want. I can't stop you.”

“I'm a healer. I can be a help, if anyone gets hurt. The dogs mostly know me, and some of them might listen if I told them to lay into someone long as it wasn't one of their masters. There's a lot of people around here could make the world a better place by getting dead, but there's a lot of people who've just tried to get by, too. I wouldn't want to see any of them killed if I could stop it happening.”

“I knew you were a good sort,” I said, smiling. “You know, I'm under orders to do anything you say so long as it doesn't go against my standing orders. So if you told me to go and stand guard at Issmil's door well, then, that's what I'd have to do. That would put him in range of my teeth and claws, when everything starts, and that’s something I’d like very much.”

“You'll want to wait until the streets clear out. He's staying at Tellara’s, far as I know. I can show you where it is. Last bell is two hours after midnight. Shouldn't be much of anyone on the street after that, least not anyone sober.”

“Then we head off at last bell, if that's your order sir, Nemmash, sir,” I said, grinning with all of my teeth.

“I'll put together some salves in the meantime. Want to help me cut bandages, if I go to the laundry and get some linen? I'll bet we're going to need them.”

“We might just.”


	10. Nemmash

The air out in the street tasted like coming snow, even though it was springtime. Lacking any sort of a coat or even shirt, Cruentus was wearing a patchwork blanket like a cloak. He followed me at heel while I tried to look like I wasn't doing anything wrong. I kept my head up, walked briskly, keeping to the line of stones right up the middle of the street.

I knew my way in and out of the brothel because I’d been called there a few times to cure poxes and deliver babies and whatnot. Tellara had an understanding with Serrik about calling in favors, including my services. 

We were in the back stairwell when someone opened a door on the floor above us. I went dead still, putting my hand out to stop Cruentus, to press him back into the shadow under the stairs. Whoever it was up there was whistling out of tune, a familiar old song about thieving crows.

Kemmat came sauntering down the stairs wearing nothing a bed sheet tied around his hips. Kemmat had been one of my friends as a brat, a charryhouse boy who'd grown up pretty enough for the brothel to take him on. He was still pretty, but getting old for this kind of work - wasn’t pulling in customers like he’d used to. We'd talked about it the last time I'd seen him, when he'd come to see me at the pit in the company of a man who'd given him a black eye and didn't want to pay for having damaged the madame's goods. King Hadden didn’t let Tellara turn certain patrons away, but he didn’t stop her from levying fines on anyone who hurt her workers without it all having been agreed beforehand.

I gestured for Cruentus to stay where he was, and I whistled. Kemmat stopped, looking startled, leaning over the railing to gaze down into the dark where I was standing.

“Someone down there?” he called, a warning edge in his voice.

“Kemmat, it's me, Nemmash. Keep your voice down,” I hissed back up at him.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Kemmat hushed, coming the rest of the way down the stairs. “Serrik'll have your front teeth if he sees that you're out and about without his leave.”

“I need a favor,” I said. “There's a man quartered here, Issmil. Mercenary sort, dumb as dogshit. He's the one that came walking into the pit with a warbeast at heel. You know what room he's in?”

“Might be I do,” Kemmat said slyly. “What are you on about, Nemmash?”

“There’s a horde of goblins and warbeasts coming out of the hills tonight,” Cruentus said from the shadow under the stairs, his voice a menacing growl. I beckoned him forward.

I saw all the blood go out of Kemmat's face as Cruentus came into the light. Prepared myself to clamp a hand over his mouth in case he screamed, but he didn't.

“Rakassa's bleeding cunt, Nemmash, what have you done?” Kemmat breathed, looking over my shoulder to stare goggle-eyed at Cruentus.

“I’m here to kill Issmil,” Cruentus said. “Don’t plan on harming anyone else, not if I don’t have to. Like I said, goblins are coming. To free the goblins you lot have got enslaved here. To take the city. I plan on lending a hand, and if there’s killing to be done then Issmil’s a likely enough first.” 

“Goblins...” Kemmat breathed, looking at Cruentus and at me and at Cruentus again. He licked his lips, swallowed hard. “Issmil's staying in the saffron suite. Just... we don't want any trouble here, alright? We've never done nothing to hurt anyone. There's brats in the downstairs, for fuck's sake. How can we stay out of this?”

“Gather up your people and get them to the basement,” Cruentus said. “They’re coming here to kill masters, not slaves, so if you keep out of the way and don’t put up a fight you should be fine.”

He said that with great conviction, and I wondered how he knew.

I led Cruentus up to the saffron suite, its gilt and carved double-doors marked with a sash of yellow silk. We stood there in the hallway outside the door, waiting, listening. I could hear snoring from inside, the thick and loud snoring of a despoiled drunk. 

Someone in the street outside screamed fit to wake the dead.

Everything seemed to happen very quickly after that. I could hear people moving, doors opening. I pushed into Issmil's suite, looking around in the dim light of two or three candle lamps. There was a naked woman sitting up, grinding the heel of her hand into her eye. Issmil was leaned up on one elbow, groaning.

“Girl, get to the basement, you’ll be safe there!” I shouted. She opened her eyes wide at Cruentus, rolling out of the bed and scrambling away.

Cruentus was on Ismil in the next second, all tooth and claw and horrible, inhuman roar. All I could do was stare in horror as Cruentus tore out Issmil's throat with his teeth, the same way he'd done with the dog on the first night. He spun and spat out a mouthful of tattered flesh and blood, then looked at me. His eyes were terrifying, an endless black well of rage that had me close to pissing myself.

There was more screaming now, from rooms beside and below us.

A goblin appeared in the doorway. It was dressed in leather and armor, face painted red and black, carrying a blood-edged dagger. It staggered to a halt upon seeing Cruentus.

Cruentus pointed at it, snarling something in his own tongue - something that wasn’t kandish or goblin as I knew it. The goblin answered in kind. They went on at each other for a minute or two, Cruentus canting his head to me, and eventually the goblin nodded, dipping its head in deference as it turned and ran back into the hallway.

Cruentus looked down at me and said, in a voice like truth,

“Nemmash, you're with me.”

I replied,

“Yes, sir.”

I followed him down through the shrieking chaos of the brothel, back out into the frosty nighttime air. He seemed to have some idea of where he was going, marching with steely purpose through the streets toward King Hadden’s castle. Now and again we saw goblins, and some of them shouted at him, and he shouted back. Some of the buildings were on fire. There were corpses in the streets. I tried to keep my eyes down, keep to Cruentus’ heel.

In the city square that faced the castle gates, there were other warbeasts. They were dressed in armor and leathers, wielding swords and axes. Cruentus shouted toward them, and when one turned to look he raised his hand and made a couple of sharp chopping motions. The other warbeast shouted back.

They didn't look much alike at all. Cruentus was taller, leaner. His face was more or less mannish, except for his pig-teeth and his goblin ears. This warbeast had a face like a troll's, with an upturned nose and a pair of tusks sticking up from its bottom lip. It was built like a bear, with short legs and powerful arms. The claws on its hands looked like they'd suit a bear, too.

It looked at me, its eyes flashing yellow-orange in the torchlight.

“Cruentus says you're a healer?” the armored one asked.

“I am,” I said, swallowing.

“We have wounded,” the armored one said. “See to them. If you need any kit, we can see it brought to you.”

I nodded again, and before I could complain Cruentus was gone and I was being shuffled off to a warehouse at the edge of the square. It was bright inside, a lot of lanterns and torches lit. They were setting up a kind of hospital. They brought me to a pallet and put a wounded goblin in front of me and... I started healing.

Everything blurred together after a while, as I stretched myself thin in the task. I started begging for water, at some point, and was surprised to have it brought to me. The second time they brought me something to drink, it was a far sharper thing than water. It steeled me, which seemed to have been the point of them giving it to me. Someone threw a bowl at stew at me, too, between patients. 

I kept on with healing until they let me stop, having lost all sense of time and place, everything just too much all at once.

I was sitting with my back up against a wall, sobbing like a little child, when Cruentus came to me. He crouched down next to me, laying a huge hand on my shoulder, just waiting there until I opened my eyes and stared at him. Even crouching, I had to stare  _ up _ at him.

“You did good work, Nemmash,” he said, and something about hearing my name on his lips made my mouth go dry. “Tell me what you need.”

“I want to go home,” I said, my voice hitching.

He picked me up, one arm beneath my shoulders and another beneath my knees. I found myself throwing my arms around his neck, too exhausted from my efforts to argue. I closed my eyes as he carried me all the way back to the pit, past the eerily-quiet dog kennels, to my workroom. Nothing there had been touched.

He laid me down on my own bed and said,

“Just don't try to run anywhere, alright? I said you were a good man, don't make a liar of me. Get some sleep and wait for me to come for you. You'll be safe here, Nemmash.”

My head hurt, and my mouth was dry, and the city was burning while the streets ran with blood. But my last focused thought before I dropped off into thick black nothingness was the sound of Cruentus saying my name.


	11. Lacero

We marched for ten days to get to the hill-sheltered goblyn settlement called Aberoch because clan Aber lived there. They’d been surveilling the Kandish township for months, sneaking goblyns in and out, pretending to be slaves - youths and oldsters and women, mostly, got up like wretched drudges. There were a lot of goblyns that’d been taken and made slaves in the Kandish township, they said. Slaver raids were common as snow. Consequently, most of the men in the city wouldn’t even look twice at a goblyn slave about their work.

The knowledge they’d gained over the last half a year with such spying was  _ bloody useful _ to us in planning the attack. They had maps of the place inside and out, knew where the sewers and sally ports and everything were. 

One of the spies, a goblyn named Gwyna, told us there was an homunculus being held slave who said he’d join up with us readily enough - him and half the goblyns in the city. The goblyns at Aberoch did good smithwork, and they were able to furtively hand out throat-slitting knives to a lot of enslaved goblins inside.

We made a quiet entrance by night, killing guards by ones and twos, goblyns within opening doors for us and warning innocent folk about what was happening, squirreling them away in safe rooms. We were already in the castle proper before anyone was able to raise an alarm. They hadn’t even had time to get the drawbridge up or the portcullis down or anything! They weren’t at all prepared for an attack, the arrogant fucks. They were so sure they had nothing to worry about from anybody except other Kandish warlords. 

We took the whole place inside of six hours, and by the time the sun was coming up we had the Kandish rex’s head - along with the heads of all the men who’d been in the great hall - on pikes in the city square just outside the main gates of the castle. We slaughtered anyone who took up arms against us, but anyone who wanted to surrender was allowed to. There were people taking account of survivors now, letting everyone know that there’d be a meeting in the city square about noontime where we told everyone how things were going to be from now on and they could decide if they wanted to stay or go.

I was weary to the bone from taking a dozen arrows or so, but we’d won. 

The city was ours. 

Me and Linea and Brunus and Valentus were in the middle of taking stock of the castle itself - its stores and living quarters and all - when one of the other fellows brought the newly-liberated homunculus to meet us. Reports were he’d performed admirably.

He was a sorry fucking sight, all sinew and bone, no proper kit at all. Probably he’d been lean to begin with, though - had a wildcat look about him. Wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that parts of a rock lion had gone into the vat he was made in.

I beckoned him to come sit with the four of us.

“I’m Lacero,” I said. “That’s Linea, and that’s Brunus, and that’s Valentus. We’re the closest thing we’ve got to leaders - have leave from the others in our clan to speak for all of us and made decisions and such. You got a name?”

“Cruentus,” he said. “Used to be in the cohort under Primus Sidonius.”

“I was under Primus Philoxenos, back when,” I said, taking a swig of ale. “We’d just took a castle north of here when the earth shook and the sky went black and all. Nobody alive afterward except homunculi. Went back to camp, found some cobali and men, tried to go north, ran into a clan of goblyns, joined up with them. Decided to take this city because clans Aber and Lochan - that’d be the most local goblyn clans - said it ought to be done. Figure we’ll spend a few weeks making sure everything here’s tied up neat, making sure anyone who doesn’t like our new rules has pissed off someplace else. That done, we’ll send a messenger back to tell the rest of our clan that it’s safe to come. What’s your story?”

“I was at Drammeldown when the Kandish took it back,” he said. “Been passed off hand to hand since. Glad to be back on the right side of things.”

“You been with them seven, eight years, then? You sorry sod,” Linea said, shaking her head. Cruentus nodded.

“You  _ are _ joining up, ain't you?” Brunus asked, looking sly. “We're not going to hold you to it, if you'd rather stalk off on your own, but you look like you're in a bit of a sorry way and we can use all the hands we can get digging into this city.”

“I was in a sorrier way for a long time before getting dragged to this city in particular,” Cruentus said. “Nemmash sorted me right out, and kept on sorting me right out as often as he was able. If you’ve got a use for me, I’d like to be useful.”

“Nemmash?” I asked.

“Kandish healer out of the fighting pit where they’ve had me killing dogs for sport.”

“Ah, heard about him” I said. “Lots of reports that he does good work. Anyway, round' midday we're going to take stock of how many men we've got alive and what they're good for,” I said. “A whole fuck of a lot of goblyns here are already pledged to clan Aber and clan Lochan. Anyone who wants to fuck off out of our city gets to - we don’t want to keep anyone here who doesn’t want to pledge under our banner. Ain’t going to be no slaves at all here - we’re making a city of free folks.”

His face was blank and confused, at that, and it was a disconcerting thing to see.

“That healer you said, you figure he's on to stay too?” Valentus asked. “We've only got a couple of others with the knack, and some leechcrafters and weed witches besides. Not common for men to have the knack. Crackin' good healer he is, too! The fuck is he doing in a hole like this?”

“He's  _ from _ here. We've had a few talks, me and him,” he said. “Did right by me, straight from the first. Ain’t right, someone soft and gentle getting treated like he’s been. There ain't many soft and gentle people in the world. They need protecting, them that are.”

About then one of the goblyns came by and brought us a whole lot of meat that’d been cut thin and pan fried, done up with pepper and spices and all. Part of the haul from the butchered rex and his primae. Too much meat on that lot to let it go to waste, and weren’t any of the homunculi or goblyns going to balk at manflesh.

“All the folk in the kitchens are set to stay on, long as we don’t hurt anyone,” the goblyn said. “The men’re all scared half witless, but putting them to tasks that need doing seems to be helping.”

Brunus and Valentus excused themselves about then, because men didn’t generally want to eat manflesh even if it was from stupid and cruel fuckers who’d needed killing. The rest of us ate in practical silence, stuffing as much food into us as we could manage. Needed it for healing up battle wounds.

It was nice to’ve had somebody cook it, first. I’d got soft and spoilt, living with goblyns, didn’t much fancy raw meat anymore if there was anything better to be had.

“If you’ve got no use for me just this minute, I'd like to go to go back to the fighting pit and find a few hours of sleep,” Cruentus said after licking his plate clean. “That's where Nemmash wanted to go after he stretched himself past breaking with healing, so that's where I put him, and I'd like to be on hand when he wakes up.”

“That's fine,” I said, waving him away. “We'll work out proper quartering for everyone over the next few days. You go take care of yours, we'll know where to find you if it's needful. I plan on catching a little sleep myself, if I can manage it.”

He dipped his head deferentially, wishing us well on his way out. Anything else that needed doing could wait until everybody had ate and slept.


	12. Nemmash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nemmash has a small panic attack, gets hugs and breakfast about it.

I woke feeling like laundry that’d been scrubbed on a board and run through a wringer. I heard a lot of unfamiliar voices speaking a language I didn’t know… goblin, probably. They were upstairs, didn’t concern me. I needed to drag myself out of bed and feed the dogs and see if any were wounded.

But then, as I stared up at the ceiling, I remembered last night.

Blood and flesh under my hands, fire and screams all around me. I raised my hands to my face and found blood under my fingernails. Blood all over me, in fact. 

It hadn’t been a nightmare. It’d happened. Goblins from the hills had come with a pack of warbeasts and sacked the town. I'd helped them do it, without hesitation. Cruentus had told me that the attack was coming, and all I'd thought of was how to help smooth the way for the invading horde.

What did that mean about me, as a man?

“You awake, Nemmash?” Cruentus's rumbling voice called, making me startle to attention.

He was standing by my worktable, looking more well than I'd ever seen him. Freshly washed, his hair clean and combed and tied back. He was dressed in leather breeches and a tunic that actually seemed to fit him, and wearing a leather belt with a war axe tucked into it. He’d probably killed folks with it, lately. Probably folks I’d known.

“What happens now?” I asked, drawing myself up against the wall, arms around my knees. I was filthy. I'd gotten blood all over my bed. Everything needed washing. 

I didn't know if anyone from the laundry was even still alive.

“Now, we get you cleaned up and throw some breakfast in you,” Cruentus said with a chuckle. “You've got to be starving after all the healing you did last night; magic always makes venifici hungry, from everything I've ever seen. There's a score of folks at the castle who want to thank you, by the by. I've been pushing them off and telling them to let you get your rest. Saw you at it for a bit at the end, after the castle was proper taken. You pressed yourself so far, patching up the wounded that were put in front of you, goblins and men and homunculi alike. You didn’t even seem all the way there at the end, fell into some kind of trance or summat, held on by hard spirits and the force of will. It was a thing of glory to watch.”

“I need to feed the dogs,” I said, feeling faint. “I'm supposed to... Serrik is going to...”

“Serrik's dead,” Cruentus said with open satisfaction. “Killed the horrible fuck myself. Don't you worry about any of that, there's others who've already got that kind of thing settled - ain’t any of the dogs even in the kennels anymore except a couple of bitches with milk pups. Most of the other ones’ve been claimed by goblins as war mounts. That wench you wanted set aside, Idda, she's upstairs running the kitchen and she's made a whole cauldron of barley porridge with milk. You want some of that?”

“I need to wash,” I mumbled, looking at my hands, feeling my head swim. “I can't eat with... with all this on me. I need... I need to get new clothes and wash off the blood...”

I felt like I couldn't get a full breath in, like I had to gasp for it. I hadn't noticed him coming closer, but then his hand was on my shoulder, slipping around behind my back and pulling me against him, hushing me.

“You're all right, Nemmash. You're fine,” he said, his voice a rolling purr that seemed to sink right to my bones. “Easy. It's been a lot for you, I know. It'll be alright. Better, even.”

I let myself melt into him, drawing comfort from his strength. Wasn’t anybody who’d just  _ held _ me like this since I was a little child. It was absolutely absurd that the one to do it should be a vicious monster crafted for war. I'd see him rip out a man's throat last night, and here he was hugging me, and I didn't have the good sense to even try and shy away. He was warm and solid and real, exactly what I needed to stop the crawling madness that had taken my breath.

“I've got spare clothes in the trunk. I need water to wash with, though, before anything else,” I finally said, when I found my voice again. “And then, yes, porridge would be...good.”

He fetched me a bucket of water, and I was surprised to find it warm. He left me to it, but I could hear him in the hallway, talking to someone in the goblin tongue. Shouting, at one point. I felt more able to keep hold of myself once I'd washed and changed out of my blood-soaked clothing. I took several breaths before I stepped out into the hallway.

“There you are, looking sharp as anything,” Cruentus said with a fanged grin. “Come on, let's get you to the kitchen. There's folks have been worried about you, and you're skinny as a bundle of dry sticks anyway. Need to feed you up proper, now that you're your own man.”

I couldn't quite wrap my head around the idea of being  _ my own man _ and not Serrik's, so I put it aside.

There were a lot of goblins in the kitchen, some I knew and some I didn't. A lot of the ones I didn’t know were dressed in leather and scale, with weapons hilted at their hips or leaning on spears. Idda was standing at the low table, cutting up turnips. Her face was red and swollen with crying, but she looked well enough otherwise. She looked up as I walked in, and immediately put down her knife to run and embrace me.

“I was so sure you were dead!” she said, her voice muffled against my shoulder, “Nobody knew where you were, when everything started happening.”

“I was with Cruentus” I said, canting my head in his direction. As if that explained anything. “Is everyone else alright?”

“Well Serrik’s dead, but there’s not much of anyone who minds that.,” she said, pushing my back to hold me at arm’s length, looking me up and down. “A pack of goblins ran through here and took most of the dogs, and killed any owners who tried to stop them, but none of them have laid a hand on me. Not on any of the other staff, as far as I know.”

“They’re not raiders,” Cruentus said, a hard edge in his voice. “Talked to their Primus, a bit. They came here to free slaves. They’re not going to hurt anyone who doesn’t need hurting.”

“That’s good,” I said, finding an empty stool and pulling it up to the edge of the table. “Cruentus mentioned something about milk porridge?”

I felt much better for having eaten, if a bit embarrassed about just how much porridge I was able to put away. Idda had stirred butter and  _ sugar _ into it. No one seemed to be worried about rationing - Idda just kept refilling my bowl for as long as I kept eating. It was hot and rich and a hell of a lot nicer than the vegetable pottage and dogmeat stew I was generally fed on.

I ate until I couldn't, until I was as full as I’d ever been in my life. Some part of me was sure that any moment someone of authority would come crashing into the kitchen and demand to know what I thought I was doing. 

Another part of me answered that Cruentus would probably kill anyone who did that or anything like it.

It didn’t happen, in any case, and when I was full to bursting Cruentus led the lot of us in the kitchen outside and toward the city square. He kept his hand on my shoulder, as if he was afraid I’d bolt. He needn’t have; I wasn’t planning on going anywhere. There were goblins and other warbeasts milling around in the streets - gathering spoils, it seemed. Taking account of what they’d won. I had no intention of leaving Cruentus’ immediate protection. 

“Lacero, their Primus - you’d call him Lord or King or something like that, I think - Is going to tell everyone what’s what now that this city is ours. Wants us to get everyone to the square for it.”

He said 'ours' not 'theirs'. He considered himself part of the invading horde.

We came out of the alley and onto the main road, the thoroughfare that led right to the castle bridge. There was another warbeast standing at the corner, his hand resting on the withers of the biggest boar I’d ever seen. It was the size of an  _ ox,  _ and easily stood eye to eye with the warbeast who was… stroking it. Cruentus walked right up to the pair and started speaking a language that was neither Kandish nor Goblin, but I stopped short a half dozen paces behind.

“Is that a dire boar?” I asked nervously. Cruentus looked back at me and grinned.

I’d seen him grinning more in these last couple of hours than I had in any of the past three weeks. It made him look quite startlingly different… friendly and open in a way I wouldn’t have thought his face capable of. He said something to the other warbeast - no, homunculus. Cruentus had said their people were called homunculus, or homunculi. The other homunculus replied, in thickly-accented Kandish,

“Nah, nah, she's a sow. Can't get the boars to do nothin' useful, not less you have their balls off, and then they're shy of battle. You can turn a boar loose on infantry if you want, but they don't give half a fuck who they gore or toss or trample, so your own soldiers need to know enough to stay out of the way. Sows is what you want for proper mounts.” He took a pace, aligning with the beast's head and scratching her behind one of her woolly ears, his voice taking on an indulgent tone. “This’s Gudrid, and she's the loveliest girl, yes she is.” The boar - sow - made a rumbling noise and leaned into his scratching.

The homunculus spoke more frankly when he turned back to me and said, “I'm Matius. Cruentus tells me your name's Nemmash?”

“Yes...sir,” I said, feeling wholly uncertain. It felt wrong that this monster should be talking to me, especially talking so amiably, as if he hadn't been part of a murderous horde that was still in the process of sacking the city…

“Bang-up job you did patching me up, last night - I was able to get right back to it! Didn't hardly kick up a fuss about it neither, not like most of the men herabouts. You're up for joining us at the castle, yeah? Cruentus’s vouching for you, and Primus Lacero wants to meet you - after the speech, of course.”

I just nodded, swallowing back the tightness in my throat.

Cruentus bid goodbye to Matius and led me - and everyone who was following - toward the square.

I heard Idda’s startled gasp before I realized what I was seeing, when we arrived there. There were a lot of people milling around, loosely hemmed in by goblins and homunculi and men in armor. There was a wide path up the center of the road that was being kept clear, so we could see all the way to the gate at the castle bridge… where eleven pikes had been driven into the ground. Each pike was topped with a man’s head.

The centermost one was King Hadden’s, still wearing his iron circlet with its row of rubies on his brow. I couldn’t make out anything about the rest of them, except the brilliant red hair that betrayed one as Baron Derrett. It was a fair guess that all of the heads belonged to barons, though. It was a clear message to all of us that they'd herded here; our rulers were slain. The city was well and truly taken. 

No point in further fighting.

I shouldn’t have felt relief, at that, but I did. I looked around, spotted Tellara and her girls gathered around a pack of children. Looking around, most of the crowd seemed to be women and children, servants and workmen. No men of any real rank.

The bells at the temple of Rakassa and the temple of Ossmore began ringing together, and I saw four people file out of the guard tower on the right of the arch that stood at the mouth of the castle bridge - a homunculus who looked wholly  _ bigger _ than Cruentus, and a goblin woman, and two men. The men and the goblin were bearing flags with goblin sigils on them. I didn’t know what they meant, exactly, but I’d seen goblins draw them before. The flags were white, the sigils a rusty red. Painted in blood.

When the bells quieted, a powerful silence seemed to fall on the whole of the square. The homunculus began speaking.


	13. Cruentus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lacero tells everyone what's up.

Seeing Lacero on the battlements stirred something in me that I’d thought my years of slavery had killed. In the seven-and-some years since Drammeldown I’d only seen maybe a dozen other homunculi, and none of them looking fit and fed and bright-eyed and glorious. Made me feel tight and warm in the chest, a kind of pride and fellow-feeling that I couldn’t quite put a name to. 

Lacero started talking in lingua vulgaris.

“My name is Lacero, and I walk under the banner of Clan Kravdarach. We’ve united with Clan Aber and Clan Lochan. First thing I want you to think about, each and all - Any of you men who’re alive are only alive because none of the goblyns in this city wanted you dead. You’re all figured, by them, as decent folks that didn’t need killing. The folks that  _ are _ dead are those they reckoned as tyrants, and slavers, and rapists.”

The goblin woman standing beside him repeated what he’d said in goblin-tongue, and then the man on the left said it in Kandish. Cruentus continued,

“All of that shit  _ ended _ today. We took this city, and we’re declaring it the Free City of Ethdoroch. We’re not having kings or masters or  _ any _ of that shit.”

He stopped for the others to translate again, and for the crowd to murmur amongst themselves for a minute, before continuing,

“Anyone who wants to leave is free to leave. You can try your luck in the wastes or find some other stronghold, if that suits you. Ain’t none of you slaves or prisoners or anything. In the coming weeks, we’ll be sussing out who’s going to be on the council. Each and every person gets to have a say about who can and can’t speak for them - going to have a council, like goblyn clans do. Right now, we figure every quarter and every guild in the city ought to pick one person to speak for their wants and needs and send that person to the great hall tomorrow at second bells to join us in the sussing out of the new city charter.”

Another pause for translation, then, 

“What we already know about the charter that hain’t been wrote yet is that everyone’s going to share out everything equal - no more of this dogshit where some folks toil and starve while others sit about in castles and do fuck all. We ain’t going to send out raiding parties, neither - every living one of us is going to work on keeping the lot of us alive without the need of murdering and robbing folks that’re just trying to do the same. Nobody’s above plowing fields and minding goats and that, if they’re able. If you want to live in Ethdoroch, you’d better be ready to do your share as well as you can - give what you can give, and you’ll get what you need. We mean to take care of eachother, like a proper clan. If you’ve got a problem with that, you can piss off someplace else.”

Another pause, then,

“Everybody under the banners of Lochan, Kravdarach, and Aber will be coming here to live in the city and its outlands - all our oldsters and brats and women and that who didn’t come for the fighting. When they get here, we’re going to have a feast and a revel about it and every living one of you gets to join in the merrymaking.”

There was a pause there, and then a general cheer went up all through the crowd. When it quieted, Lacero said,

“For right now, there’s still shit that needs doing to make the day go on - fields need planting and goats need minding and bread needs baking and all. You each know your business, so we figure you can get on with what needs must without somebody barking orders at you. Suss it out between yourselves who’s coming to the council tomorrow. Anyone who’s leaving, start gathering up your kit. We’re going to have our folks out and about in the city taking stock of who has what and how it can all be best put to use - there’s a fuck of a lot of rancid holes that aren’t fit for anyone to be living in, and we plan on cleaning them out and making them fit for folks. We’re making it our business that everyone in this city’s got food, and drink, and a warm place to sleep at night. That in mind, you all know your business better than we do, so get to it!”

Lacero took a bow, and the three of them carrying flags set those in posts where King Hadden’s flag had been hanging yesterday. They filed off back into the tower they’d come out of.

Everyone around us started talking, and I looked to Nemmash, who was looking completely bewildered.

“Like I said before, Lacero asked me to bring you to the castle after the speech. Think they’re trying to organize a proper healer’s guild, since you don’t seem to have such a thing hereabouts. Gather up all the healing herbs and potions and such in the whole city and set up a proper hospital someplace inside the castle walls. There’s a lot of civil kinds of things that’re done in Mel Terram that make a city run smoother and cleaner and nicer, going to work on having that kind of thing here. Water pumps on the wells, and decent paving on all the streets, and proper sewers. Never got to see any of it myself, but there’s men among this crew that’re actually from Mel Terram to begin with and they know some of the ins and outs about how to get that kind of thing going.”

Nemmash nodded, but didn’t say anything. He just reached to me and put his hand in my hand. Him doing that made something in my gut flip over… the implication that he trusted me to lead the way…

I grinned at the brimming sense of warmth in my chest, and led him towards the castle proper. 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nemmash starts to come to terms with an abrupt promotion.

I’d never been into the castle; hardly ever got in sight of it, even. Wasn’t any reason in the time since I’d fallen under Serrik for me to leave the dogsprawl, really. Now here I was, letting Cruentus lead me by the hand past the row of heads-on-pikes, under the gatehouse arch and its pair of portcullises, across the drawbridge, through the second gatehouse, right  _ into the castle _ .

There was an open bailey containing several outbuildings, groups of goblins and homunculi and a few scattered men and women moving from place to place with obvious purpose. We made a lot of turns and passed through a number of open gateways before arriving at the main entrance of the castle itself, a stark edifice of crumbling plaster revealing stone beneath. We passed through a narrow corridor with doors on either side, and stairways leading upward, but Cruentus went right past those and led us into what had to be King Hadden’s great hall. 

There was a dais at the far end of the room with a great wooden throne flanked by other chairs, a table before them. There were fireplaces set into the walls at either side of the room, but no fires lit in them just now. Four people were sitting at the King’s table, but none of them were sitting on the throne. The table before them strewn with scrolls and ledgers and such. They were the same four who’d been on the battlements, the homunculus who’d given the speech sitting centermost. The goblin woman was sitting cross-legged on the table itself, at the homunculus’s right hand. The homunculus looked up at Cruentus as we approached, then right at me. He stood.

He was at least a handspan taller than Cruentus, and not as lean. Dressed in leather and chain, all clean and polished. His face was more goblinish than Cruentus’s - frog-wide mouth full of narrow, pointed teeth, a snub nose, and wide yellow eyes with no whites to them. He was a darker brown than Cruentus, and dappled with near-black freckles across his nose and cheeks. His hair was black, and long, and braided the way goblins sometimes braided their hair if their master’s didn’t keep it shorn. It was terribly disconcerting to be looking  _ up _ to a goblin face, when I was used to goblins being between two and three feet tall. Half-goblins could be bigger, but those were mostly stillborn or smothered. A woman who was known to lay with goblins was likely to be stoned for it, and goblins who got pregnant by men didn’t usually survive long enough to give birth. There were a couple half-goblins working for Tellara, but they were the only ones I’d ever seen.

The homunculus in front of me was like a half-goblin that was seven and a half feet tall. 

He said something in that other language, the one that wasn’t Kandish or goblin, and after a minute Cruentus said something in reply that ended with my name.

“Lacero,” the other homunculus said, thumping his left hand on his chest and extending the right toward me. It took me a long moment to realize that I was supposed to shake it. 

“Nemmash,” I said in reply.

The homunculus talked again for a long while, then looked at the goblin woman who was sitting beside him. She looked at me and said,

“I’m Linea, war chief of clan Kravdarach. So Lacero here figures you’re wasted where you’re at, and anyway we’re not running anymore blood sports in this city. Dogs shouldn't be kept in cages. Folks want to brawl, that’s their business, but nothing like the kind of shit that Cruentus here’s been telling us happens at that pit of yours.”

“What about the dogs?” I asked, realizing too late that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be talking back. Linea conferred with Lacero for a minute in the other language, then said,

“Dogs that can be put to use as guards or mounts will, dogs that’re too vicious to take new training will be put to use as meat and leather. If you’re planning on hanging about and not pissing off somewhere else, we’d like to have you here at the castle - put you together with other healers. That sound agreeable to you?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, dipping my head a bit. For all the talk of equal say and freedom, it was clear that these folks were in charge now the same way Hadden had become king - by killing the folks who were in charge before them. Making myself useful to folks in charge was, in my experience, the surest way of keeping myself fed. If Serrik was dead, it was good bet that the kings of all the other boroughs were dead too, and that these folks would be installing new borough kings as they saw fit. If they wanted me up in the castle instead of down in the dogsprawl, well, that could only be a step up in the world.

“This great hall here is going to be our new meetinghouse, and the kitchens are going to stay the kitchens because of course they are, but folks are walking around the castle working out what’s going to be what besides that. We’re not making any real decisions until the rest of our folks show up - our healer Orla in particular, as concerns the hospital - but we’ve got a couple of other healers and last I knew they were looking at making a claim on what used to be the castle barracks. Go have a look at that, talk with them. If you think it suits, then go gather up all your kit from your old workshop and bring it here. It’s going to be shared out according to who needs it most. Lot of hurt and sick people kicking around this city, specially goblins. The clans are still sorting themselves out, finding their kith and kin that’ve been stolen. You have any folks that you want to track down and check on, you can get to that too. Cruentus is going to follow you; a healer with a knack is too important to be wandering around without a proper guard.”

That thought was bewildering, that I should be under guard because I was important. The more obvious reason was that they didn’t want me bolting; I was valuable to them the same way I’d been valuable to Serrik. In any case, I didn’t have any plans on bolting… and there was something powerfully comforting about the idea of having Cruentus at my back while all of this was going on. No knowing which gang leaders were still alive, or who knew that Serrik was dead. There were a fair number of pettier bosses than Serrik who might want to snatch me to be their personal healer now that I wasn’t his. Having Cruentus guard me sent a message that I’d be claimed by the new king of the city.

Linea called another goblin over and said something at him in goblin tongue, and he nodded.

“Tag’ll take you to where the other healers are meeting at the barracks,” she said, waving us off. 

What was there to do but follow?


	15. Lacero

It took us three days of cleaning up and tying down to get shit into even basic order. Wasn’t just the taking of the castle - the city had its own maddening layers of rank and clout that we’d well and truly fucked up by killing a lot of the lynchpins. 

There were six boroughs of the city - The castle and castle square, market square and merchant’s hill, temple square, the dogsprawl, riverside, and the southwash. On top of that, there were more than a dozen guilds that spread out their influence across the city without particular regard for the district boundaries. Lots of the guild masters were still alive, but of the ‘borough kings’ the only one that the local goblyns hadn’t figured better off dead was an oldster called Blind Akkas. He spoke Laithe better than most of the men in the city, and he pledged to our cause, and practically all the men in riverside rallied under him once he’d spoke. Brought the boatman’s guild with, because of that. 

Those first three days were spent putting down petty gang leaders who were trying to muscle their way into power and influence, trying to get folks to pick out  _ proper _ leaders for themselves and not just cow to bullies and tyrants. They only wanted to listen to men - and then only  _ men who had cocks _ . It was hard because practically all the men we had in our company were Terrani and didn’t know Kand, and the Kandish men didn’t like the Terrani ones anyway on account of the war. What Kandish men we had pledged to the clans were mostly women, and the Kandish often as not didn’t give a fuck about what they had to say. 

We ended up deferring to the local goblyns more often than not, because a lot of the local goblyns spoke both Kandish and Laithe, and lots of ours spoke both Laithe and Lingua Vulgaris.

Cruentus was the only homunculus who really knew Kandish, so we kept him handy at the castle to translate. He seemed entirely content to do everything he was told, like a good soldier. Something just a little off-putting about him, somehow… reminded me of a fellow fresh from the vat, like there was nothing going on between his ears  _ except _ the idea of following orders. It was the same with a lot of the goblins who’d been slaves a long time.

Left without orders, he tended to stick close to the Kandish healer, and wasn’t any good reason to stop him doing that. Kept him at the old barracks, right in the center of everything, handy for translating.

At the end of three days, something like a third of the men in the city had decided that they’d rather not be here if the place was going to be - as they saw it - ruled by goblyns and homunculi and Terrani men. They screamed and swore and wept, told us they’d rally all the other warlords ‘round to come and take the city back from us. 

We told them they were welcome to fucking try.

It became a hell of a bother when we made it clear that folks who wanted to leave weren’t allowed to take folks with them who didn’t - lot of men seemed to think it was their right to drag ‘their’ slaves and ‘their’ women and ‘their’ brats off with them. Lot of funny ideas Kandish men had - they figured men and women were all sorts of different, and that men ought to be in charge of women. Railed on about something called ‘marriage’ which didn’t seem all that different than slavery, from the way they talked about it. 

We had to have a whole other speech and send out criers telling everyone that we didn’t give a single fuck who was married to who. Folks who wanted to go could go, and folks who wanted to stay could stay, and each and every living person got to choose for themselves and that was fucking that.

The ‘priests’ at the temples got their backs up about it, telling us the gods would punish us. Didn’t like it at all when we pointed out that we’d already lived through the world’s end. That the homunculi hadn’t been made by gods like the Kandish men claimed they were, nor made bargains with any like the goblyns claimed they had, so we didn’t owe the gods shit. We knew who our maker was, and he was dead, and fuck him anyway for having been a tyrant.

Four and five days in, certain folks who were massed at Aberloch started coming - craftmasters, mostly. Orla the healer and a handful of Terrani men and goblyns took charge of turning the castle barracks into a really proper hospital, and Brunus and Valentin called all the clan chiefs to meet with all the Kandish guild masters and the new Borough Kings to work on the charter. I was glad enough to stay out of the talking parts of that. I was a soldier before I was anything else and didn’t fancy being the person to try and knock sense into kings-who-weren’t-kings. 

Had to keep reminding myself that it was worth all this fuss and bother to have a stronghold. Had to spend part of every day standing on the ramparts and looking over the city and thinking on how safe our brats would be behind stone walls. How we wouldn’t have to go hungry with fields and forests and a river to call out own.

It was ten days after we’d took the city that we decided all together that it was cleaned up enough to be safe to bring the brats and the oldsters and everyone in. I’d not have guessed how badly I missed having them around underfoot, asking questions and getting in the way. Found myself thinking every day on Brathu and Minog and what they might be up to, what they’d think about this or that, what they’d be nattering me about.

Didn’t know I’d end up  _ crying _ about it on the tenth day when they came charging up to me in the main bailey of the castle, safe and sound and in the company of all the homunculi fellows who’d stayed behind. Mostly them as were brewing brats inside them or had sucklings. I spent most of that day showing my brats the castle, taking them up to the battlements to look down over the city, marvelling at their marvelling. I slept that night with my brats tucked in warm and safe on either side of me and felt full in a way that I hadn’t known I’d been empty.

Linea marked the return of her chief - and hence her setting aside war-chief duties - by spending a whole day in what’d been the barracks’ mess, drunk and shout-singing songs about victory and valor. Me and a load of other lads joined her in it, and got to know the folks in the kitchens better, and they weren’t so terribly scared of us after that. Having the brats around seemed to ease everyone a lot, really. 

The goblyn chiefs of the three clans called up all the goblyns in the city that’d been taken as slaves, and all the ones that’d been born here as slaves, and there were speeches and oaths and such - and dickering about which parts of the city everyone’d be principally settling in, since the clans each wanted their own spaces. 

It was the fullness of a fortnight after we’d took the city that we gathered everyone up in the castle square again and announced that it was time for celebrating. We dragged the old king’s throne into the middle of the square and made a great spectacle of chopping it all to pieces and using it to start a bonfire. That got a cheer from the crowd. Dragging out practically all the casks from the old king’s cellars and meting out beer and mead and wine to everyone got a bigger cheer. 

For once in my life - after the war and the winter and the famine and the raids and all of it - everything seemed to finally be working itself out. I got drunk, and ended up in a friendly brawl with a couple of fellows called Viridius and Aigness, followed them to a hay barn off the main bailey. We had eachother off by turns, and I fell asleep, and I woke up to them fucking eachother. I watched for a bit.

Viridius and Aigness were sweet on each other; everyone knew it. There were a lot of the lads who’d formed those kinds of attachments over the years, groups of two and three and four who were particularly sweet on each other. Viridius’ brats looked like Aigness. I couldn’t have said who my brats looked like, besides looking like me.

I’d never wanted for anyone to warm my bed, but something about having been the Primus for so long seemed to make most of the lads hold me at arm’s length, as it were. I still got ‘yes sir’ and ‘no sir’ from them, when I started barking orders. Watching Aigness and Viridius tumbling in the hay, looking at each other all intense and fierce and… well. There was something to it that left me wanting, and not knowing exactly what it was that I wanted.

I got up and muttered something about finding a proper bed so I didn’t wake up with a sore back, ended up finding myself another pint and another song and another brawl before heading to the room I’d claimed. My brats were already asleep there, and I didn’t want to wake them. 

I ended up sitting on the ramparts, watching the sun come up. 


	16. Cruentus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cruentus has caught feels.

Part of me was still waiting for the hammer to fall. Being taken back by my fellows, having a proper Primus to give me orders… to say nothing of my new duties being the pleasantest I’d ever been put to. Felt like it couldn’t last.

My standing orders from Lacero hisself were to be wherever Nemmash was at, and to put fear into anyone who got stroppy with him. Other homunculi and goblins came to me now and again, wanting me to translate something Kandish. I got proper rations every day in the mess, porridge and stew and ale and a share of whatever else was on hand. Got a proper bunk to sleep in with a straw-stuffed bolster and woolen blankets and all, in a room that had its own fucking fireplace. Got free access to the castle’s baths, even, which had a hot soaking pool and everything.

Wasn’t my business to want anything, given all that. 

Lacero and his had took the city with thirty homunculi, which was a reasonable enough size for a cohort. On the tenth day after, another dozen-odd homunculi showed up with all the goblins and men - and with them they had  _ homunculi brats _ . Brats that I felt instantly protective of the moment I laid eyes on them. Round about twenty of them, including the sucklings. It hadn’t ever occured to me that our sort even  _ could _ have brats. They looked up adoring at certain soldiers and called them ‘papa’, and babbled on about anything and everything in little voices, and scrambled around making nuisances of themselves. 

Aside from being near triple the size of a normal cohort (brats included) Lacero’s was  _ different _ than mine had been, back when, in a way I couldn’t put words to. They’d been together for all the years since the day the sky went black. All of them had names, right down to the sucking brats that couldn’t even walk. They all knew everything about each other… and I didn’t know a damned thing about any of them. They’d got past all the struggle and dominance and hashing out of who was what, didn’t scrap with each other except in friendly sorts of ways. There was something raw about being back among homunculi but still being outside of things. Made me feel hollow, somehow.

I’d meshed into a cohort before, back when - had three other middle-of-the-pack lads as particularly close fellows. We’d all watched each other's backs, fought together against anyone who tried shit with any of us. We’d helped each other with straps and buckles on our kit, braided each other's hair with whatever fancy bits of shine could be had from the mannish settlements we ran ruin over, brawled and fucked without being for show or rank or to prove something to someone.  _ Slept _ together. I badly missed having the warm weight of a fellow pressing down on me, physical evidence of knowing he was close and he was looking out for me like I was looking out for him.

I knew that two of those fellows were dead; seen them crushed by a boulder that the Kandish siege force had flung over the city walls in Drammeldown. Not even homunculi could come back from that. I didn’t know what’d become of the third, but if he wasn’t dead then he was still being misused by Kandish masters in some mannish place south of here. I’d got used to being alone years ago, the only homunculus among men and goblins. Hadn’t considered what it might be like to be back in a cohort and still feel like I was on the edge of it.

Not being sent to the pit to fight something every evening meant not being torn up at the end of every night. Meant that Nemmash didn’t have a reason to be handsy with me like he had been… and I didn’t know at all how to ask him about it. Didn’t want him to think that I presumed anything, because I knew that a lot of men thought the idea of laying hands on an homunculus was disgusting. Not  _ every _ man… Primus Sidonius had often picked out a fellow who was game to suck his cock, when we were camped. Me more than some others, because I had a more mannish face than most when my teeth were tucked in and he liked that. He’d liked to watch me stroking off while I sucked him, liked to have another of the lads fuck me so I was full up at both ends. Liked watching me come, telling me what a good soldier I was.

Hadn’t had anything as nice as that in all the time I was a slave under Kandish men. Anything of the sort that’d involved me in those years wasn’t something I wanted to think on. 

Just having an eye on the lay of things, Lacero’s cohort didn’t seem to be any kind of shy about fucking. There were some who seemed to like making a show of it, even - make a game of wrestling until one of them was pinned, then getting their kit off. If it was just a tumble I wanted with the aim of getting off, I’d no doubt that I could find a fellow or two or three to oblige. No one’d come to me with offers, yet, and I hadn’t asked anyone.

Because that wasn’t what I wanted, not really. 

I wanted to put my hands on  _ Nemmash. _ Just as much as I wanted him to put hands on me. Wanted to show him what I could do with my mouth, wanted to see him buck and moan and come under my attention. Wanted him to run his hands up and down my back, sleep in my bunk tucked in beside me, have him braid my hair and help me with my kit and all that. 

Problem was, it could be so easy to put a foot wrong if I tried anything on. The way he acted around me now... he  _ talked  _ to me, like I was worth talking to. Proper  _ friendly _ and everything! Told me stories about what things had been like when he was a brat, and talked about possets and potions and that, things he was learning from the old half-goblin that was Primus of the healers. Last thing I wanted was to fuck that up somehow. Didn’t want him to think less of me, or think I was getting above myself. I knew what I was.

I’d learned, in my years kneeling at the feet of a lot of different mannish masters, that men generally found homunculi terrible and frightening and  _ ugly _ \- same as they mostly thought goblins were ugly. Goblins didn’t seem to mind us as much; they took homunculi as we were - but with goblins there were practical matters of size to worry about. Lacero’s cohort had thrown in with goblins very early on, wild ones that weren’t slaves to men - any men they had with them, in fact, were pledged into goblin clans. Fair number of half-goblins in their ranks, like there just weren’t in Kandish places. 

My days went on like that for a couple of weeks; following Nemmash at heel and having him talk at me, and eat at the same table with me, and try to pull me into conversations with other people. Wasn’t something that I was used to, or really any good at, but it always made me feel a kind of tight warmth in my chest.

I didn’t have the slightest idea what to do about it. 


	17. Nemmash

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nemmash gets healing lessons, unfortunate things happen to beetles, and Cruentus doesn't know how to cope with feels.

I wouldn’t have guessed, a fortnight ago, that the city being sacked by goblins and monsters would the best thing to ever happen to it. The best thing to ever happen to  _ me _ .

I’d known for a long time that it was rare for a man to have a knack at all; it was mostly goblins that had knacks and the ones that did weren’t often captured as slaves. I’d never met anyone at all who had a healing knack like mine, never knew anyone who could tell me anything about it. I might have, if I’d joined the guild of healers when this city had such a thing, but things hadn’t played out that way for me. Everything I knew, I’d learned myself by trial and error. I’d picked up scraps of herbcraft from Idda, and I used my knack to piece it out and improve on it when I could. That’d been the whole of my education. Meeting Orla and becoming one of her students was something of a shock - not a terribly unwelcome one, but a shock all the same.

Orla was a half-goblin, old enough that she looked like one of those harvest dolls with a face carved from a windfall apple. She had a younger goblin who shadowed her everywhere, and translated everything she said into Kandish, and helped her move from place to place because she was frail in her age. The younger goblin didn’t seem to like me much, always snappish and suspicious, not as fluent in Kand as many of the enslaved city-goblins I’d known. It took me better than a week to learn that her name was something like ‘Eeltag’ and that she had a knack too, one for kindling fires. 

“She say,” Eeltag was saying, looking at me like I was completely dim, “Think a fish-catch-net spread out over the whole world - always there, even before gods. Everything tied into it; animals and herbs and trees and folks. Everything alive made from strings, strings part of the net. You got a knack, you can touch-feel string like other people can’t. You can tie knots and untie knots and break strings and weave strings together.”

“I...don’t think that I understand,” I confessed. She stared at me as if to say ‘of course you don’t’ and said something in goblin -  _ laithe _ \- to Orla. Orla pulled a face and talked for a while before Eeltag began translating again.

“She say everything has a shape it is, and a shape it wants. Knack-person has another shape they want a thing to be. Closer shapes are to same, less hard a thing is done. She say, can't ever get something from nothing, not ever  _ ever _ . Add to one place, take from a different place. You, you got flesh-knack. Flesh wants to be whole and good and sound and right - wants to  _ work _ . When hurt or sick, flesh is wrong-shaped. You touch with knack, find wrong shape - knotty string, hole, tear. You fix it back the way it wants to shaped. Take some string from hurt-sick person, some string from you, weave it all back into right shape. Healing - it knows the shape it wants to be. She say, you take too much from you - tired you, hurt you. You could flesh-work better if you take string from not-you. You look what she do now, you touch-feel with knack.”

Orla, apparently having been waiting for Eeltag to finish talking, reached into a small bag tied to her hip and pulled out several acorns, laying them on the table. She spoke in laithe, which was a sing-song kind of language that seemed to eb and flow.

“She say, nuts - tree seeds. Small little lifes. Touch them - sleeping, not dead. Waiting to be trees.”

I put my hand down on the acorns, as instructed, but couldn’t feel much of anything. I couldn’t feel the same strings of magic I’d have felt laying a hand on a person or an animal. Orla put her withered little hand on top of mine and made a dissatisfied noise, speaking to Eeltag, who said,

“Shy say, you too loud, too push, too  _ man _ ! Small life, seeds. Quiet.”

Orla reached into her little ouch again and pulled out a small basket with a lid. She took the lid off and shook several beetles onto the table. They were large, for beetles, perhaps half as big as the acorns. She moved my hand to cover those instead.

“Them, feel,” Eeltag said.

I closed my eyes and tried again. It was much easier, with the beetles, to feel the threads of magic that made up their little lives.

“She say, feel bug. You know, you touch. Bug hurt, you heal.”

The old half-goblin moved my hand aside enough to select one of the beetles, grasping it between thumb and finger. She squeezed it with a sickening crunch, not smashing it entirely but certainly doing it quite a lot of harm. She tucked it back under my hand.

It required practically no effort to set the beetle right, and I felt it knit itself back together as I fed it magic. Orla kept her hand on mine throughout, and started speaking when I was done. Eeltag translated,

“She say you take string from you to make bug healed. Don’t! Take string from other bugs. She show.”

Orla moved my hand again, and selected a different beetle this time to be squashed. She pressed her hand down against mine onto the tabletop, holding all of the bugs still, and… she healed the one she’d squashed. I felt it, felt how she found the littlest of threads and how she pulled not from herself or from me, but from the other beetles. It left all of them weaker, but the cracked one whole. 

“I understand…” I breathed, not quite believing that I understood so easily. She offered a mostly-toothless grin and spoke, and Eeltag said,

“She say good. She say try and try. Take life from strong, give to weak, all alive. She say, take from seed, give to bug, is a thing knack can do. Not good to give life of you - make you weak, tired. Can’t heal people when you weak-tired.”

Orla demonstrated, on another unfortunate beetle, the principle of drawing life out of an acorn to heal a bug. The acorn visibly withered, growing pale and brittle as she pulled life out of it. She crushed it to dust with her palm and wiped it off the table’s edge. Having done that, she gathered up all the other beetles into a hand because popping them, one at a time, into her mouth. Between bites she said something, extending her beetle-filled hand toward me.

“She say, you want?”  Eeltag said.

“...No, thank you,” I said, edging backwards. 

Orla repeated her offer to Eeltag, who accepted, and said to me,

“Bark-bugs are very good, taste like pecan nuts, go bad very fast when dead. Only springtime food, rude to say no. Men don’t eat bugs?”

“No… not usually,” I said, thinking of the famine years.

Having crunched her way through all of the beetles, Orla spoke again at length.

“She say,” Eeltag translated, “You have a lot of knack. Big-big knack. Knack the kind made fellows like him there, if you get smart about it.” She gestured past me and I turned to see Cruentus, who was leaning against the wall behind me. He hadn’t been there when we’d begun this lesson - I’d left him talking without another of the homunculi in the hallway. He’d evidently come in and moved behind me in total silence, cooly observing the lesson for who even knew how long. 

It was somewhat unnerving how Cruentus hardly ever left my side - he was always there, at my left shoulder, watching and waiting. I understood the value of having a guard on me when I went down into the city; someone to keep me from being snatched by a petty gang leader, someone to keep me from any ideas of running away. I didn’t understand why I was under guard even when I was locked behind castle walls, though. I tried, as often as possible, to include him on whatever conversation I was having with whoever was talking to me. Talked with him, if no one else was around - he didn’t do a whole lot of talking back, usually. It was nice to have someone to talk to who seemed to actually listen, though. 

Still, I was more interested just now in what Eeltag had said.

“What does she mean, ‘made fellows like him?” I asked, glancing from Eeltag to Orla and back. 

“What, you don’t know?” Eeltag said, again looking at me like I was a dullard. “Him and his not born, except for the little ones. They  _ made.  _ Some big-big Terranish mage put them together out of dead things. Had death knack, made dead folks get up and fight - you call hollow men? I don’t flesh knack, but Orla says everything alive has string, and everything dead. Less than alive string, but some. Ask him there, he talks Kand better than anyone, he can tell you about how the man-mage put them together.” She tossed her head in Cruentus’ direction, and I turned to look at him. He wasn’t leaning idly against the wall anymore - he was standing at attention, blank and stony-faced, the way he’d always looked before being thrown in the pit. She said something to him in lingua vulgaris, and he walked over and sat down next to me, not looking at me or at anyone.

“Do you understand what she’s talking about?” I asked. He nodded, swallowing.

“She’s not wrong,” he said, his voice heavy and somehow brittle. “I was wrought at the gods’ forge on Nova Terram - the place you lot call the  Isle of Waters . I expect the rest of the homunculi were forged there too, except for the brats.  Estiennos Rex - the King of Nova Terram - he was a mage that could raise the dead. He came up with how to make us; how to pull souls out of living folks and bind them up in stone, how to put them into bodies he’d built out of dead flesh. He could work flesh the way a smith works metal in a foundry, melting it all down to make something new - men and goblins and animals, all together. Far as I know, me and my cohort were some of the first, made while he was still working out the details of how to do it right. Lot of failures, in those early batches. I can’t really make sense of things that far back, but I think I was a failure two or three times before I came out right enough to be worth keeping. Mostly I remember it hurting. Wasn’t good, in those early days, we were all at each other's throats all the time. Point is, made to purpose - forged as weapons, just like swords and axes, with the aim of routing you lot.”

He sat there, staring down at the table, looking like he was bracing himself.

I felt like I’d missed something, but I hadn’t the slightest notion what. I only knew that something had him upset. Whatever Eeltag had said to him in lingua vulgaris, maybe. 

“You look like you need some air,” I said, putting a hand on one of his. He tensed at that, and I moved my hand away quickly. I looked at Orla and said, “I think we’re done with lessons for now.”

I didn’t know if Eeltag translated that; I didn’t stay to find out. I got up and walked to the door, looking back to Cruentus, tossing my head for him to follow.


	18. Cruentus

I hadn’t even had to bother with fucking everything up myself, the goblin girl had gone and done it for me. No wonder Nemmash had been so warm and friendly with me this whole time - he’d known fuck all about homunculi and thought I was properly a person and not just a weapon that’d passed through a lot of hands. 

I followed him to wherever he was leading, which seemed to just be wherever people weren’t at. Ended up on a stretch of battlement that looked out over the river, someplace that’d evidently been a sentry post once because there was a stone bench built in the shelter of the wall and perching on it meant a body could see out between the crenelations. Nemmash sat, beckoning for me to do the same. I did, even though I felt like I ought to be on my knees.

“What’s wrong?” Nemmash asked, his voice soft and friendly in a way it didn’t have any right to be. I didn't look at him. Couldn't look at him. I didn't want to see pity, and what else could there be now that he knew the kind of thing I was? The kind of thing all homunculi were. 

He put a hand on my shoulder. I tried not to flinch.

“I didn’t know you didn’t know,” I said, my voice tight. “About me… about us, how we were made, and what of, and why.”

“What difference does it make, my knowing?” he asked. I wondered if he was playing at something… but he didn’t seem like the sort for that.

“It’s just been nice, you know?” I said, careful and slow so my voice wouldn’t hitch. “Having you talk at me, like you think I’m a person? Having you paw at me, back when I was getting ripped up everyday? It’s been years since anyone put hands on me when it wasn’t a fight or worse. Never had a healer touch me at all before you did. I knew it couldn’t last forever, that I’d fuck it up sooner or later, but it’s just raw that I had to be the one to explain to you what I am...”

“I don’t think I follow,” Nemmash said. “What do you mean, what you  _ are _ ?”

“I’m a tool, a  _ weapon _ ,” I ground out. “Weapons get wielded for as long as they’re useful. Right now, Lacero says I’m useful watching over you, so that’s what I’m for. Being talked at and being asked to talk back isn’t what I’m for. Sets me wanting things I’ve got no business wanting, all this, and I ought to put a stop to it myself but it’s fucking  _ nice _ so I don’t.”

“How are you not a person?” he asked, bringing me up short.

“I’ve been alive for something like ten years,” I said, closing my eyes, not wanting to look at anything at all and especially not at him. “I spent the first three ripping out throats for Estiennos Rex, and the seven after that ripping out throats for  _ whoever fucking told me to _ . Do you have any idea how many men have used me to kill other men? Used me to kill goblins and put them in chains? Used me as the weapon I am because that’s what I’m fucking for?”

“That doesn’t mean you’re not a person,” Nemmash said, something stubborn creeping into his voice. “It means you’re a person who’s been dealt an especially shitty hand. Things are playing out different now, with this lot in charge. Doesn’t have to be the way it was.”

“And what way’s it going to be, eh?” I asked, baring my teeth. “Lacero and his, they’ve all got eachother, and they’ve got the goblins they joined up with - had proper lives this whole time, brats and everything. I’m not like that. Everybody I ever knew got killed, and I got put between hammer and anvil until I was this. I’m what we’re  _ supposed  _ to have been. It’s not my business to want things.”

“What is it that you want, Cruentus?” He asked, and something about hearing him say my name hurt as bad as being stabbed in the chest with a dagger.

“I want  _ you _ ,” I said. Came out like a sob, like blood coming out of a wound. “Just shows how fucked I am, but I miss how things were right before Lacero and his showed up - that night after the first fight, when you came up bleeding’  _ asking _ if you could heal me? First time in years anyone’d had my back. You letting me sleep on your table, making sure I got proper meals in me and not just meat from my kills? Made me feel… fuck, that’s the whole problem. I’m not supposed to feel. It’s not what I’m  _ for _ .”

“Look at me,” he said, his voice all soft and quiet, making the order sound like a question. I didn’t want to, but I obeyed. Opened my eyes and saw him standing in front of me. Him standing and me sitting put us at a like height. Wasn’t pity he was looking at me with… couldn’t tell what he looked like, exactly, but it wasn’t pity and it wasn’t disgust and that was better than I could have hoped for. He looked me in the eyes and asked, “Who gives a bleeding fuck what you’re _ for _ ? You been listening to the speeches that Lacero and his lot have been giving off the walls, about freedom and every man having a say and all? You get to decide what you’re for, now, just like any of the rest of us. Here I’ve thought you were following me around all this time because I was under guard - how much of that was really orders and how much of it was you wanting to?”

“Mostly my wanting to,” I admitted. “I know that me and my kind are ugly, as men see it, and the homunculi in particular are hideous because of the mannish bits mixed into us-”

Nemmash reached out and put his hand on my face. I couldn’t help closing my eyes and leaning into it. He said,

“If you wanted me, you should have said.”

Then he leaned forward and kissed me, and everything else fell away. 


End file.
